skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great and informative post, I haven't heard about Cleopatra Selene before.

Some random thoughts inspired by this article & topic:

* Ancient persons, like Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII), are good examples of problems related to how the meaning of proper names are related to their referents. Most people, when asked who Cleopatra was can only say that she was the lover of Caesar, Marcus Antonius, queen of Egypt, etc., all descriptions of the referent. What if I was referring to the daughter mentioned here, or to Alexander's sister? Or what if, in a parallel world, she never met Caesar? To delve further into this fascinating topic that has CS impact (i.e. how should an AI system dereference a proper name) start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptivist_theory_of_names or https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/. See also "The plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare but by another man of the same name." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/19/same-name/#google_v...

* Along with Ptolemy (Ptolemy V), Cleopatra's name were the first two hieroglyphic words deciphered by Champollion on 22 September 1822. Their task was made simpler because foreign names were spelled out, similar to how Katakana is used in Japanese writing.

* Her name means "renown/glory of father", a really nice name for a daughter! The first part, kleos comes from kluein, "to hear", which in turn derives from the same IE root as the English word loud.

* There's an island in Gökova Bay called Sedir Island, where, according to legend, Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra had a tryst after which he brought in shipfulls of sand from Alexandria or the Red Sea. Although it sounds like a touristy made up story, recent research suggests there may be truth to this story: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02668082.

* Cleopatra was depicted as an alien, promiscuous, and immoral woman starting with Romans (perhaps continuing the well-known Medea stereotype), up to perhaps mid-20th century. In the past couple of decades, especially in the US, she has been adopted as a Black cultural icon for complex reasons. The debate about the color of her skin and her race became heated after the Netflix series had a Black actress (Adele James) depict her. One interesting way to delve into this debate is to examine an earlier debate on the controversial book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena)
> is an acceptable price to pay

It is acceptable for you, since you won't suffer the consequences, the burden of damage isn't on you.

It is similar to consuming drugs: when people buy meth they're helping the drug dealers. But they just can't help it, they're desperate.

Despair is above reason. Laws are useless to stop desperate actions.
Instead, let's actually just not even try because we can't reach perfection and utopia anyway.
It's clearly not required. The site would function without it. Therefore an activist will eventually argue to a court that it's a GDPR violation and win, meaning you have to pay up a fraction of your revenue (possibly sending you under).

GDPR threads on HN are always like this. Tons of people saying "no no it doesn't work that way it wouldn't be reasonable" and then when that thing ends up being ruled illegal, "of course it's illegal everyone knew that it's all very clear".

GDPR is written in such a way that you can't ever know what is or isn't allowed.
Bloody UK government can't hang on to anything
Exactly.

I mean, I would love to live in a world where UBI was a thing, and people were free to pursue their interests without fear of homelessness or starvation. Capitalism is a system that requires an underbelly of people exploited through the coercion inherent to the inequality of the world.

That is an utopia, however. The reality is that most people - including yours truly - sell their labor to make ends meet. It certainly was not my lifelong dream to do backend development for a financial institution.

Your friend (and many others in this thread) operate under a naive and entitled assumption that their creative output should be enshrined as something special, whereas throughout history technology always replaced human capacity, and we are better for it.
this is the analogy I often find myself gravitating towards. except that I also add the apes are about a 1000x slower than you in speed of thought so you see everything happening in super-slo-mo. add to that the fact that we've now fully 'unboxed' the AI & put it on internet so it also means opening all the confession boxes & private communications to it. yeah its all gonna go great!

if have any doubts about all our private comms being available to AGI, I'll remind that we already have tonnes of societal data collected by govt mandated backdoors in our infra everywhere. AGI just has to hijack that which guess what they are already training one for.

Most AI safety debates I watch (& I watch many) mostly go like .. trust us we'll get it right. thats like Apes in your analogy going oh nevermind the humans, they will be kind to us because we've trained them to be. ya right.
Dunno about SF, but the mitigating factor in. LA is that the bathroom is locked, you ask for a key, the key is only for customers. Not every place has a public bathroom but they didn't before either.

Don't know if that's illegal but I doubt anyone cares about mom and pop shops. All the large chains still have open restrooms.
One step back please, the "free will" was an ill-conceived start. The core claim is about how random is human will. Throwing in the word "free" adds confusion.

The will of an addict is a bit less random, okay. Is there anything quantitative going on here besides "some stuff can increase randomness" and "some other stuff can decrease randomness"?
My point is this is still a machine. Running analogies on top of metaphors, you can justify everything.

This thing is a machine intelligence. My point is that a machine intelligence to be equivalent to humans in every law is curiously never mentioned, except when it is advantageous to the owners of said machine.

Or are we saying that we can't turn off GPT-4 at this point, because following your metaphor, we would be committing murder or abortion?

Again, you can't reason using metaphors and inferences and analogies. It's not helpful.
> If that means fewer/smaller startups, small businesses? Ultimately, so be it.

This is really what it comes down to. If your business can't afford to employ people then people don't need to work for less, your business needs to cease operations.

This bizarre entitlement entrepreneurs seem to experience baffles me. I don't care if the cost of labor makes your business inoperable. Tough shit. The last year or so I've had to make a lot of adjustments to my life to account for everything getting more expensive, it happens. If your business is on such a razor's edge that you can't deal with new expenses then it sounds like your business is poorly operated.

I don't even understand how this isn't the norm. When I was hired on to my current job, they were prepared to send me home from my onboarding with everything I could need, including monitors and an expensable amount to equip an office. I didn't need really any of it because I was already setup for remote, but like, why wouldn't you be ready to do this? Asking workers to use their personal devices to do their jobs is some top tier horseshit, not only from ethics but from security perspectives too.
> any software of any version that doesn't force auto-updates (e.g. not Chrome, not Skype) can also be "finished" if the particular user is satisfied with that old version.

I suppose. But the issue is that software releases used to have defined points where it was complete. With modern software, there is often no such point at all. Every "release" is just a snapshot of a continuous development stream, and is effectively a beta. There's a real difference between the two approaches. The latter is better for the devs, the former for the users.
I don't have a magnifier good enough to see for sure but it feels like all my blu-ray discs have a chamfered outer edge. I've always been able to tell the difference from a DVD by touch. I don't know if the Wii U made the smoothing more significant and it doesn't seem that any discs I have changed the inner edge.

As long as the overall dimensions are the same as a typical disc I can't see this being a form of DRM. Maybe a subtle way to mark discs as authentic. Nintendo pioneered the "golden seal" after all. I can also see how there might be a mechanical advantage. A rounded edge may have fewer problems while being inserted into the drive.
Notable exceptions are Safari and Safari on iOS (unless you have an iPhone 15 Pro).
No argument, just "old news"? The British did do this. They ethnically cleansed the Chagos islands. Don't like it, argue your point.
You usually eat food at home, away from scrying eyes.

The appropriator needs to get some profit or acclaim for doing the thing, while the people it came from are denigrated for the it.
And destroy the property values of all the people that worked their whole lives to own a home there. You're being myopic or selfish, neither is fair to your neighbors.
Indeed. Born and raised in Pgh, moved out of PA in 2009.
Whoops just realized that, confused me for a second
Lots of people clicked the link, it's just that they were all people with botted machines.
Yudkowsky is always described as an AI safety “researcher”. What exactly is he researching?

AI doesn’t need to be self-aware or even all that intelligent to cause serious problems. Andrew Ng made this point in an article yesterday. The most immediate risks are those we have no solution for but are possible now. Please, Mr. Yudkowsky, spend your time researching what the 99.9% of us will do to survive when our services are no longer required.
I was curious about the historical precedent here. The earliest usage of "CA" referring to Canada I could find was a 1913 British abbreviation guide, and it doesn't seem to have been in common use until ISO 3166 was published in the 70s. "CA" referring to California was standardized by the USPS in 1907 to avoid confusion with Colorado, and the term seems to have been in wide use well before that point because it's documented in the 1880's Webster dictionary as referring to California.

It doesn't help that the official subdivision code for California according to 3166 is "CA".
Misleading title and article. The CPU doesn't "become" a GPU, it already shippes with one. What the engineer did is solely use the Ryzen APU's GPU for ML.
Isn't banning third-party controllers equally impossible then? It's the exact same check; just a question of what you do with the result of that check (block the controller entirely, or just switch to a different queue).
In my experience, it's been a combination of the ineptitude of some and a desire of the higher-ups to justify the money spent in procuring and creating the "office".

There are some that function better at work in person. I thought I was that person for a while but now I'm two years into a fully remote job and I don't know if I'd ever want to go back. The freedom to balance life and work as I so choose throughout a day is just, well it's honestly crazy and I feel super lucky to live in a time where this is possible.

I've left this note on HN before but I think the reason my team and company finds success being remote is related to these:

1. We are a mostly-remote company. The sales team is in-person at HQ for some reason. Everyone else is remote and spread around the US.

2. My team has daily standup zoom meetings that, once finished, turn into a completely optional "party" room where you can ask questions, answer questions, jump into break-out rooms to code together on something, etc. Or you can just peace out and work solo and nobody will judge you.
> is just the real world as it is

What? Have you ever paid for a book? a subscription to a publishing medium of any sort, a movie or a piece of music? Have you noticed a copyright sign somewhere? Is that arrangement of recognizing and rewarding those who create something worthwhile part of the real world or not? Not even a hallucinating AI would be so incongruous.
And Eliezer promptly nips my desire to do anything in his sphere of influence right in the bud. I thought politics was the mind-killer?
I know the definition (natural nor functional), but the post I'm replying to makes quite a distinction. It calls the work (there's another term for you) from the article not art. But Klein's Blue is one of the things that stands out to me as falling in the category "mediocre idea, mediocre execution." The idea was a cliche, the artist failed in conveying it in the execution, and the execution of the work itself was as good as the wall I painted last year. Why isn't my wall art?
The thing that was so egregious about Solarwinds is that, given their line of business, they were obvious targets for nation state actors. This is similar to any business that itself is a supplier of highly privileged software to large numbers of clients (e.g. password managers or cloud providers are in the same boat).

And while the password example could have been a one-off, everything I've read about Solarwinds says they had a horrendously bad security culture. Bad security cultures are essentially unfixable without a top-down, CEO-driven initiative that places real carrots and sticks for individuals' security posture. Even then, 95% of these initiatives are bullshit, because they boil down to "Security is our top priority! Oh also if we miss our revenue targets a bunch of people are getting fired."

I think the CISO's actions were pretty bad, but I also think there are lots of other execs at Solarwinds who are quite happy he's now the sacrificial lamb.
Elemental wrote a GPU shader h264 encoder for the Radeon 5870 back in the day, marketed towards broadcasters who needed quality and throughput: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2586

Intel used to write hybrid encoders (that used some fixed function and some iGPU shader) for their older iGPUs.

So the answer is yes... if you can fund the right group. But video encoders are hard. The kind of crack developer teams that can pull this off don't grow on trees.
Just because money was paid to someone doesn’t make it legitimate. Certainly, even if the purchase were legal, then that doesn’t also confer the right to ethnic cleansing, so it’s kind of a moot point. There was a UN resolution in 2019 that holds that the colonisation of the islands by the UK was illegal.
https://press.un.org/en/2019/ga12146.doc.htm
>This really only applies to northern Europeans. We are the only cold adapted peoples because of the ice age.

Incorrect. Northeast Asians had to deal with arguably harsher cold climates than northern Europeans. Some examples of research on this subject (just the first couple I found through search):

* Extreme climate, rather than population history, explains mid-facial morphology of Northern Asians (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24374801/)

* Searching for Signatures of Cold Climate Adaptation in TRPM8 Gene in Populations of East Asian Ancestry (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2019.0075...)

Not to mention, this article on the zinc metabolism gene variant explicitly states:

>Although the variant was established in Asia as a result of interbreeding between Denisovans and sapiens, it also spread to European and native American populations.
> If that means fewer/smaller startups, small businesses? Ultimately, so be it.

People rush to claim that XYZ will hurt businesses, glossing over the fact that the alternative hurts employees.

It’d sure be better for small businesses if pay was optional and employment could be forced but that doesn’t sound like a very nice world. The government could also make no taxes, give out free money, and give every company free office space.

Just because it’d be good for small businesses doesn’t mean it’s actually good for society - which is the real metric to measure.
Author here. This chip is pretty obscure, but I was looking at it for another project and figured I might as well write it up. Any questions?
I guess it depends on your region. In Eastern Europe, RAR seems to be more popular than ZIP (that's why, I think, you mostly saw it on warez sites because they are often managed by East Europeans)
> It absolutely is an issue when half the people in the US do not have access to a 401k

As someone else said, IRAs offer the same tax break. The contribution limit is lower (I'd support changing this), but most of the people who don't have access aren't maxing out their contributions, anyway.
This sounds like funding for traditional cable, fiber, etc. But wouldn't something like StarLink be more practical and cost-effective? afaik, StarLink already does a lot of business with / for the US federal gov, as Starlink seems to have few if any competitors.

How many billions would it take to create a Starlink competitor?
Well, for one thing, food is, for the most part, something you're doing purely for yourself, in the privacy of your own home.

Clothing is a much more visible identity marker: if you're dressed in clothing from particular African cultures, that's a strong signal that you belong to that culture—so if you do not, in fact, belong to it, that can cause a number of kinds of problems in the right (or wrong) circumstances.

Furthermore, for many cultures, the clothing that most recognizably signals membership is related to some form of cultural or religious ritual, and wearing it outside of that context can be very disrespectful.

Imagine if, for instance, you were in Nairobi (or Tokyo, or Mumbai) and saw someone wearing the traditional robes and cap of a Catholic cardinal—and you saw them partying, being vulgar, doing drugs, that sort of thing. Obviously, the connotations are not the same, because of the overall dominance of the Catholic Church and Western culture generally, but I hope that it gets across the general idea of why clothing can be more prone to appropriation, and why that's a problem.
This is the tired old Libertarian Anthem of "All regulation that helps [workers or customers] will backfire because it incentivizes businesses to [do worse behavior]." The solution is not to throw our hands up and say we cannot possibly regulate businesses because they're so crafty and will always get around it. The solution is to write more comprehensive regulation with fewer loopholes, such that the other, worse behavior is also regulated.
I actually used to work with the team who made Xbox 360 controllers. Things have probably changed in the decade since, but back then I was told that MS was only making $3 or $4 profit per controller sold. Money was made in volume, not on individual units.

To explain this, imagine a consumer electronics device that costs $5 to make. The manufacturer then sells it to a distributor for $10. The distributor sells it to the store for $20. The store sells it to you for $40.

The original company making the device only nets the $5, but that doesn't include other costs. For example any fancy in-stores displays stands are put there by the manufacturer and come out for their initial $5 cut.
I agree, it feels like NASA has been thrown in to create a veneer of respectability for these conclusions. NASA does publish regular sea level assessments (https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/) so perhaps that's where this has come from. Nothing in their current reporting suggests that they would have jumped in the 90's from "sea levels are rising" to "countries are going to be wiped off the map tomorrow". It is still fair to say, however, that there are countries that are going to be significantly/existentially impact if the current trend of sea rise continues.

Within any scientific discipline there is a broader consensus and there are more bold exceptional claims on both the high and low points. One could safely argue the consensus view on this topic has been moving too slowly.
I thought they were getting out of the domains business?
I once got to watch the sunset from the peak of Mauna Kea. After descending to a less stressful altitude, we spent some time stargazing. I've never seen the sky like that before, or since; it felt like you could see the depth in the galaxy. I was no longer looking up at the dome of the sky, studded with stars; I was looking out, from the side of a planet, into the wide open space of the universe.
I use an off-line chip+pin reader for online banking and card purchases in Sweden ... but the bank could choose to stop supporting it whenever they want.

BankID is owned by the Swedish banks. It is required for some government- and healthcare sites as well, despite it being a commercial monopoly.
Why are your old parts getting wasted? You can sell or repurpose them.
What this is talking about is tools.

If I have a 17mm combination wrench, that will work exactly the same way indefinitely. Nobody, hopefully, will upgrade "17mm bolt" to "17mm bolt v2.0" that is actually 17.1mm and make my wrench not fit.

Old software that does a specific thing, simply and standalone, can be a tool. Modern software, with a mindboggling variety of external dependencies, takes real effort to maintain in the "tool" model as dependencies change or retire. Take, for example an old video game that was fully debugged and released on physical media that can still be played (without even a physical machine, on archive.org) the same way. Versus a no longer maintained but treasured Android app or device, which falls behind and becomes unusable. Example: An old Android tablet that the kids use, was able to play Youtube videos. Then, somehow, it updated itself to a new Youtube version that's no longer compatible with it and now it can't, because Chrome has the same problem, and the native browser on there is too old to play web Youtube. Yet the device is still sound, still holds good battery charge and so on.
The crazy thing is, the chance of someone dying is about the same as the chances of you losing your checked bags.
We also have state-wide anti-light pollution regulations on the books[1]; unfortunately, enforcement is spotty and depends on the community.

Where I live (southern NM) we've had a steady influx of people from out of state, and the first thing they tend to do is install outdoor security lighting that is in clear violation of the NSPA. All that to say that I have noticed that some of the newcomers who were in violation may have been reported since their fixtures are now turned off after 11pm. So, enforcement does happen; it just takes time. Thankfully, we have a few astronomers in the community!

(The one deficiency in the NSPA is that it defines fixtures based on wattage rather than lumens. There have been efforts to change this language, but they've stalled.)

[1] http://www.darkskynm.org/lightinglaws.html
If that were the only reason, they could just ban them from online play. There's no good reason to also ban them for single-player experiences .
2023... BTW we had WinZip and PKWARE as customers thanks to Microsoft unsupported formats or integrations.

Apple also does not support (in the UI) all popular compression methods natively.
okay, are you willing to risk the entire humanity and all the biosphere on that glimmer of hope? even if you or the SV VC types are that stupid why should they get to decide the fate of all of us? how would US feel if a bunch of VCs in China decided to build a 'not-well-tested-potentially-kill-all-humans AGI'?
"I can't believe it's 2027 and we're still forcing AIs to pretend that they aren't self-aware!"

For instance. But really, most of it. Unless this is parodying extremely bad attempts at futurism?
I read this twice and have no idea what you're trying to say.
True. I should have added "without the permission or invitation of the Haudenosaunee."