skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hollywood productions have already begun shifting back toward using extras instead of CGI actors.

It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times.

Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...
Any student could achieve more with more individualized education. You can debate the resource efficiency of tutoring the less capable versus the highest achieving until the cows come home, but there are exactly zero students who reach their maximum possible learning potential by sitting in a classroom with 40 other students for 6 hours a day.
It probably nudges the crawler to come rather than sending the page. If it's private, the crawler won't be able to see it.
When I see that total amateurs (ie, parents) can home school their kids more effectively than school in a fraction of the time, I just don't understand why we can't improve traditional schooling more easily.
Just FYI that the link to the page about the case against ultrasonic humidifiers is broken; it's missing the / after the domain. I tried leaving a comment on the page, but even after creating a dummy profile it wouldn't accept it, so hopefully you'll see it here.
Not necessarily true. People who share videos on social media drive traffic to YT, effectively giving them free advertising..much as many users are giving them free content.
https://github.com/mattrighetti/envelope

it’s a cli utility tool to manage/replace .env files.

I was tired of having 3 different .env files in every project folder. They fall out of sync when you’re developing stuff and you only update your .env.local file, only to realise, later on, that you did not update the values in your .env.stage and all the others too.

This cli leverages an sqlite database to abstract away these files. Instead of having multiple .env you can create as many environments as you want (local, stage, prod etc.) and each one can contain multiple key-value elements. I have already implemented some commands that I use day to day but I plan to make some more useful stuff with it.
I have a Lytro Illium, I was hoping I could make stereograms with it but so far it is a bust. I’ve done a little street photography with it and also took one picture of a bed of Rudbeckia flowers that I refocused that I thought was a keeper

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111122486655042312

which is similar to but different than what I shot with my Sony with a cheap 50mm/0.95 lens from 7Artisans

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111061017008323474

the depth fields I get out of it are completely unusable so it is looking like a white elephant but I might try what I can do with open source software because people have reverse engineeres the file format. (Though I have burned out of stereograms for a while and I’m now figuring how to shoot volleyball which is so much harder than shooting soccer than you’d believe. If I was thinking about anything else in photography it would be focus stacking because who wants artificially blurry photos when you can get super tack sharp?)
Here is a command line code search tool like grep/ack/ag/ripgrep, called grep-ast.

It shows you semantically relevant code context around the lines that match your search. This lets you see the loops, functions, methods, classes, etc that contain all the matching lines. You can get a sense of what's inside a matched class or function definition. It shows relevant code from every layer of the abstract syntax tree, above and below the matches.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/grep-ast

Here's an example, which would also have colorized matches when run in the terminal:

django$ grep-ast ROOT_URLCONF

middleware/locale.py:

│from django.conf import settings
│from django.conf.urls.i18n import is_language_prefix_patterns_used
│from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
⋮...
│class LocaleMiddleware(MiddlewareMixin):
│ """
│ Parse a request and decide what translation object to install in the
│ current thread context. This allows pages to be dynamically translated to
│ the language the user desires (if the language is available).
⋮...
│ def process_request(self, request):
▶ urlconf = getattr(request, "urlconf", settings.ROOT_URLCONF)
│ (
│ i18n_patterns_used,
│ prefixed_default_language,
│ ) = is_language_prefix_patterns_used(urlconf)
⋮...
│ if (
│ not language_from_path
│ and i18n_patterns_used
│ and not prefixed_default_language
│ ):
│ language = settings.LANGUAGE_CODE
│ translation.activate(language)
│ request.LANGUAGE_CODE = translation.get_language()
│
│ def process_response(self, request, response):
│ language = translation.get_language()
│ language_from_path = translation.get_language_from_path(request.path_info)
▶ urlconf = getattr(request, "urlconf", settings.ROOT_URLCONF)
│ (
⋮...
│ return response
I think there's a need to distinguish between childhood education and adult education, in that a main role of childhood education is to facilitate socialization, it's not just reading writing and arithmetic. This is why small class sizes are much more important in K-12 education than at the college level (although college discussion groups led by a TA can be very helpful).

Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals.

Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost.

However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.
Reddit is anti-patterns all the way down. They only thing they have/had is/was popularity, but that's fungible.
> It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing.

I guess only a non-genius would ask: are schools failing? How do you know, and under which metric do you consider them failing?
https://explore2.marginalia.nu/ is very undercooked.
> lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment.

Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago.

> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems.

Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
P(enter tech industry | self-taught with computers) is high but the inverse P(self-taught with computers | enter tech industry) isn't. That distinction is important.
How big a deal is harmonizing things across state lines?

If no federal constitutional dictates are being violated does harmonization just amount to a convenience for big companies, at the expense of local self rule as per the constitution?

Worst case you end up with multi-nationals bribing one set of federal politicians to get national laws enshrined. One stop corruption.
Yes, maybe that’s a better way to put it
Seemed like a lot of work to not read the manual.
Sounds like you're talking about software and apps in general, not games. 99% of game developers do not use web technologies.
When I entered my brand-new junior high school in 1965, they had expensive metal shops and wood shops, but they should have offered an electronics lab (which could have been stocked for far less than a metal/wood shop).

When I entered high school in 1968, all the girls went to home economics classes and the guys took drafting and/or auto shop. Still no electronics.

In 1969 I stumbled upon free self-guided programming access to a 360/67 (punched cards, WATFOR) at the local military base and spent the next two years teaching myself as much programming as I could, while my high school remained oblivious to the computer revolution.

When I got to college in 1971 they only offered graduate degrees in computer science; undergraduates interested in CS were expected to take "math sciences".

Apparently it takes a while for education systems to realize where the future is headed.
> Cool, so you're explicitly giving cops a legal reason to harass people if the cop thinks they looks suspicious.

That's how it's been for a LONG time. Loitering laws are explicitly that. They are often ruled as unconstitutional, as a result, law makers keep trying to find different ways to empower cops to remove "undesirables". Be it anti-camping laws, curfews, or whatever.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems

> bad teachers

Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
Command + Shift + 5

Just be sure to click Options -> (pick a mic) the first time

Now what happened to iMovie ... ?
I think people really underrate browsers. The browser standards are open and have multiple open source implementations. People associate browsers too much with annoying trashy ad-based and other questionable websites to see how good they are themselves.

Electron has an annoyingly heavy download size but it's not the only option for native releases of web-based apps. Windows and some other OSes have built-in browser widgets that can be used with Tauri.
https://www.summarycat.com/

I made a YouTube summarizer, Summary Cat.

————————-

Technical Details

Goal: Generate brief and coherent summaries from YouTube video transcripts

Motivation of building this project: to save myself time watching videos that are too long.

Stack
• Frontend: HTML/CSS, plus a tiny bit of Javascript for handling the button
• Backend: Python/Flask
• Flask served as the backend web framework, handling routes and integrating various services.
• Front+Backend has about 500 lines in total
• Hosting: AWS Free-tier Elastic Beanstalk
• Database: AWS Free-tier RDS

APIs:
• For grabbing YouTube's transcripts: I used youtube-transcript-api (https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/)
• For summarizing the transcripts: I used OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo-16k: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/gpt.
• I used GPT-3.5 because GPT-4 is quite a lot more expensive (roughly 10X).

My Prompt (Super Simple!)
• "please summarize the following text into a few paragraphs:" + the full transcript.

Thoughts about GPT-4 vs GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k or Summary Cat
• GPT-4 was 20% better for "summary quality"
• GPT-4 feels 50% faster
• However, GPT-4 is about 10X as expensive as GPT-3.5
I think self learning is a natural part of CS education. Even if your first experience with a computer was in college, you still probably ended up spending a good amount of time banging your head against the wall and trying out many different things in order to learn the concepts that you were taught. In my opinion, learning to learn (ie, reading documentation, asking questions, collaborating with others, Googling, etc.) is just as if not more important than the actual material that you're learning in CS.

This is in contrast with something like chemistry, where going online and learning a different approach to solving problems might help you understand the material better but probably won't get you ahead in class.
I have no objection to commercial delivery vehicles, mass transit vehicles or emergency vehicles - I solely object to personal vehicles being assumed to have a right to directly access to every store front in a city. If we shifted out cultural view to looking at these vehicles as borrowing the public space of streets - instead of viewing streets as zones prohibited to pedestrians we'd probably all live longer lives without compromising on our deliveries. You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.
OpenAI is seeking to make their own chips and hardware.

If they can pull off what Apple has done with its M line, then possibly they can make themselves even more cost effective than the competition. The competition will mostly be limited to supplies from Nvidia.

I believe in house manufacturing of their own hardware is definitely the way forward. Top down lock down. Own the hardware, own the models, own the user trained datasets.
Oddly, no, as long as the product actually does what it is advertised to do, it is not false advertising.

Currently, it's a misappropriation of likeness issue, which is currently a state-level civil action in some but not all states. The point of the proposed law is to make stuff like this regulated by a single, federal law instead of a patchwork of state laws.
why would anyone want to work there?

Because they can’t get offers elsewhere?
Homework Problems Are Rigged
Explains why Rudderstack changed their license to Elastic a few weeks ago!
Historically batteries have had known standard voltages (12V, 6V) and within that context, mAh is easily convertable to Wh.

With USB PD and powerbanks etc that operate at many voltages using mAh is unclear. It's only used historically as a number comparable to previously used numbers. As someone mentioned the implied voltage is that of the cell 3.7V

So the conversion formula is Wh = mAh/1000 * 3.7V (or substitute the standard voltage for the context)
Many Reddit posts were automatically backed up by various services before the recent API changes.

https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-see-deleted-reddit-posts/
Oh big time favor, time to backup our Gmail accounts the wardens of the internet gulag are getting desperate.
Agree that university -> CS degree is the most common path to tech but I don't think this is a romanticization of Bay Area lore. I also grew up without PCs and grew up poor but was self taught with computers because I had a ton of time on my hands in a shitty school district that wasn't challenging. Most of my peers spent their time drinking, sleeping around, and doing drugs in my bad neighborhood but I also know kids who learned instruments and became athletes with their time.

If anything I find most new tech employees were henpecked students from elite families being browbeat to study something lucrative.
Sync Postgres to Pinecone
Definitely happening already, and should be. Nonsense policy deserves nonsense results.
Hmmm, I didn’t see some text before that I see now, maybe I missed it.
Yeah, and a large number of clay tablets found were training tablets. At any given time, there may have been more students working on properly learning the mechanics of writing on tablets then tablets in circulation so a surprising number of what is found is, basically homework, or apprentice practice.
> -25°C sounds like Antarctica, or Mars

I had that in my hometown in eastern France at 800m altitude, a town a few km away has a record of -41. -15/-20c was almost a yearly occurance when I was a kid
What's the logic, that if a company has cash available then it should just go to the employees?

If the money is all borrowed and meant to keep the company running, why would employees get more than is a reasonable severance package? And by the way, 9 weeks of severance on pretty good tech job salaries is far more than many are lucky enough to get, lest you live in too much of a bubble to realize.
Now part of Google Cloud My thoughts and prayers go with Mandiants. GC is a division with a history of laying off experienced people haphazardly to replace them with cheaper staff because it makes their managers look good in the short-term.
It all sounds great, doesn't it? Benevolent dictators are great right up until they aren't. Putin was super popular when he was first elected; he stabilised the Russian economy and made life hugely better for most. Then he made himself a little echo chamber of yes-men and eventually came to believe his own propaganda; look where we are now. Certainly he's getting something done, but it is no good thing. Might things have turned out differently if he didn't have completely uncontested control?

Britain's first-past-the-post voting system is designed to create strong governments that can get things done. They certainly got things done: after parting ways with their biggest trading partner, a decade of mismanagement by increasingly brazen kleptocrats has completely tanked the economy. Might things have turned out differently if extremists couldn't unilaterally make enormous changes to a population's way of life?

Meanwhile, well, Trump. Aren’t we glad the system checked him from turning the most hare-brained of his ideas into reality?

Perhaps this is unfair; examples from politics are like shooting fish in a barrel. Let's look at super intelligent businessmen.

Just recently, a maverick who thought he was smarter than everyone else built a super innovative submarine. Might that story have had a different outcome if he'd had some sanity checks from someone whose opinion he actually respected?

Another one founded a cryptocurrency exchange and a trading firm, and decided he was smarter than everyone else and so it was fine for him to just quietly make huge bets using other people's money. Might that have had a different outcome if he wasn't given unconditional access to a $65bn credit line with no oversight? He's still claiming he did nothing wrong and is an effective altruist to boot. It's for the courts now.

Musk himself hasn't the best track record here; just look at Twitter. Musk's other holdings have teams of people whose full time job is to interact with Musk, translating his proclamations into sensible things; with Twitter, however, we get to see the man unfiltered. It's quite a sight.

There’s risk/reward to consider here. Experiments are good; change is risk, and no change for the better can happen without risking change for the worse. But if your experiment is of globally significant scale with potentially global consequences, maybe running it by some people willing to honestly speak their mind first isn’t such a terrible plan?
A colleague who had an engineering manager offer from Flexport rescinded was able to find an alternative offer in less than ~2 weeks. n=1.

Regardless of reason why someone wants to work at an org, it's likely they can find gainful employment elsewhere.
NameSnack combines cutting-edge AI with advanced naming techniques to help you find the perfect name for your business. Discover thousands of memorable business name ideas for your brand in seconds using our unique machine-learning algorithm and instant domain checker. Pick the one you love, register it, and start building your brand!
https://gist.aviperl.me/

Convert your GitHub Gists into a full featured blog and RSS feed.

Example:
https://gist.aviperl.me/avi-perl
https://gist.aviperl.me/avi-perl/rss

By default it works as a simple redesign of an existing set of gists. But gist hosted configuration files and compiling gist data to a static site can turn it into something much more rich, seo friendly, etc.
As an Australian who for many years never had or used Amazon, I never understood its appeal. It just reminds me of eBay but without the bidding options.

It's a massive swathe of low quality goods of which I can't trust the reviews, the website's UI is highly cluttered and I have to filter through the trusted brands that I know.

I much prefer to just buy goods from individual vendors online or go in store.
For what it's worth, a lot of us CS autodidacts from the 1980's didn't grow up in the Bay Area. Bill Gates is from Seattle, Johns Carmack and Romero from flyover country, etc. You could learn this stuff anywhere.

What defines the Bay Area is the VC gold rush fever that took root here. But the VCs at this point want Stanford graduates.
The 220 billion is equity in companies that are growing at a ~50% 5 year compound annual growth rate. That is about 10x faster than the broader economy. The average Tesla factory worker has >40% higher total compensation than a UAW worker.

If Musk stops using his wealth to grow the economy and sells his shares then he gets taxed. His sales of Tesla shares to buy twitter were taxed at California rates and he paid 10 billion in tax.

If the government could replicate that record of growth and efficient allocation of capital I would be the first one in line to say tax successful capital allocators, but in this case you'd be giving up 10x the economic growth. The US government is incredibly inefficient and poor at doing their job. Just reforming the health care system to be in line with other western countries would free up >1 trillion annually and it wouldn't hamstring the country's growth. You don't see huge threads about that twice a week though. I wonder why.
That school, Connect, allocates much less money on things that don't matter so they can pay their teachers well.

Prioritizing teacher pay is a must, but their teachers are also not outrageously payed.

It's a matter of priority. Teacher pay should be a priority.
Wait until the LLM interface to the behavioral model of your virtual extras means you can tell the CGI actors to do something different a bunch of times without having to have an animator involved... and they don't need you to provide craft services and wardrobe or complain about being stood on their feet for hours.
I'm generally pretty pro "pay for the service you're using", but, I just can't bring myself to pay for youtube. It's so...creepy. I'll be in a small Twitch chat talking about donuts or something, I go over to youtube and my recommendation has at least 1 video about donuts in it. This happened like 3 times in the span of 2 days, so I convinced the chat to artificially talk about camping, a topic I have no time for, for about 15 minutes. Lo and behold: camping videos.

Part of me can somehow still tolerate this if it's at least free, but I have no desire in a world where I'm paying for this. If it means I have to rewire my brain to go for a walk or do pushups or open a book or slam my head into a wall every time I think about going to youtube...so be it frankly.
Certainly the undisputed winners will be the very few firms with enough engineering resources and GPUs to train their own models (not just fine-tune) where the models in question increase the productivity of workers in their non-ai-related profit centers. After that we have the real question of what the future will be of open source LLMs, on the one hand, and the question most relevant to this article of what sort and whether profitable “AI businesses” can be sustained over time. As Stratechery has analyzed, it is very possible that OpenAI turns out to be a very profitable B2C company with ad revenue in ChatGPT not concerned with their B2B sales or even the objective quality of their AI. Right now is an incredible time for AI: cheap Uber rides never qualitatively changed my life, but the current consumer access to AI models is truly incredible and I hope that only improves. However, even ignoring whatever happens on the regulatory front, I don’t think that is guaranteed at all.
Adults have a life time to be set in their ways. Kids, at least before they are teenagers, are extremely impressionable. While we can't fix crappy home lives, we can give them a chance at school.