skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's human. It's us. It's the use and distillation of all of human history

I agree with the general line of reasoning you're putting forth here, and you make some interesting points, but I think you're overconfident in your conclusion and I have a few areas where I diverge.

It's at least plausible that an AGI directly descended from LLMs would be human-ish; close to the human configuration in mind-space. However, even if human-ish, it's not human. We currently don't have any way to know how durable our hypothetical AGI's values are; the social axioms that are wired deeply into our neural architecture might be incidental to an AGI, and easily optimized away or abandoned.

I think folks making claims like "P(doom) = 90%" (e.g. EY) don't take this line of reasoning seriously enough. But I don't think it gets us to P(doom) < 10%.

Not least because even if we guarantee it's a direct copy of a human, I'm still not confident that things go well if we ascend the median human to AGI-hood. A replicable, self-modifiable intelligence could quickly amplify itself to super-human levels, and most humans would not do great with god-like powers. So there are a bunch of "non-extinction yet extremely dystopian" world-states possible even if we somehow guarantee that the AGI is initially perfectly human.

> There is every reason to expect a human-derived AGI of beyond-human scale will be able to rationalize killing its enemies.

My shred of hope here is that alignment research will allow us to actually engage in mind-sculpting, such that we can build a system that inhabits a stable attractor in mind-state that is broadly compatible with human values, and yet doesn't have a lot of the foibles of humans. Essentially an avatar of our best selves, rather than an entity that represents the mid-point of the distribution of our observed behaviors.

But I agree that what you describe here is a likely outcome if we don't explicitly design against it.
It's hard to figure out whether it's trolling or not.
You are conflating Illya's belief in the transformer architecture (with tweaks/compute optimizations) being sufficient for AGI with that of LLMs being sufficient to express human-like intelligence. Multi-modality (and the swath of new training data it unlocks) is clearly a key component of creating AGI if we watch Sutskever's interviews from the past year.
> Besides getting said company to 800 people burning a sweet billion, he didn't do anything else in his life

Getting a company to that size is a lot.
This was the first time I bought a font, and -- surprisingly -- I haven't regretted it at all. Every time I look at my terminal there's always a little bit of happiness at how elegant the font looks.
I have bought it on sight, and never regretted a second after installing it. It's readable, easy on the eyes, and really brings the character of "the golden era of computing" to your environment. As a person who have started with computers relatively early, this font makes me feel at home.

I use it on my terminals, text editors, IDE, and browser, and it's both unobtrusive and delightful, at the same time. If you're into dark themes, pair with Gruvbox Dark. You won't regret it.

It's doesn't follow the trend, but puts its own rules on the table, and it shows.

I can't recommend this enough.
Now try learning to code in C with a single book and no Internet, like I did.

Kids these days

:P
Sounds like Ilya should change his name to Iago
It's capable of jack shit until they release it and let independent reviewers without NDAs review it.
There is no particular reason to expect that OpenAI will be the first to build a true AGI, responsible or otherwise. So far they haven't made any demonstrable progress towards that goal. ChatGPT is an amazing accomplishment and very useful, but probably tangential to the ultimate goal. When a real AGI is eventually built it may be the result of a breakthrough from some totally unexpected source.
also Lex does a deeper technical dive with him here : https://youtu.be/13CZPWmke6A?si=BR-KCq1AQeWgzUZ3
that was NOT in any way an invitation to have a protracted debate

I think there's something fundamental that you're failing to understand about how public forums work. Nobody has to ask you for an invitation.
Psychedelics plus therapy; it is the combination that works.
can you elaborate a bit more on your setup?
I strongly agree, yeah! The trick is making those tensions constructive and no matter who's at fault (could be both sides), someone failed there.
How is this supposed to do any good?

Bob produces something with AI but claims he produced it himself and signs it with his private key.

AI produces something and signs it or doesn't, but if it's signed you can just throw the signature away and either publish it as unsigned or sign it again with a different key.

Signatures allow Alice to verify that something is signed by someone who has Bob's private key. If only Bob has Bob's private key, that means it was signed by Bob. It doesn't tell you whether it was generated by AI or not if Bob doesn't want you to know, because Bob can sign whatever he wants with his private key.

In this case "Bob" is presumably supposed to be some camera with DRM, but that means it will be in the physical control of attackers and anybody who can crack any camera by any manufacturer can extract the private key and use it to sign whatever they want, which is inevitably going to happen. Keys will be available for sale to anyone who wants one and doesn't have the technical acumen to extract one themselves. Since that makes the whole system worthless, what's the point?
What did you love about it?
but worse!
It seems openAI has ~500 employees (well, 495). This is being handled with somewhat enigmatic, ceremonial language fitting to an imperial palace with different factions. Interesting to watch, but also a bit ridiculous
It understand it's inefficient, but could it be used by a well-resourced organization where confidentiality is extremely high-value and the database is small, such as intelligence, military plans, Apple's product plans, etc.?
And is that really a problem?

Infrastructure ages and needs to be refreshed. Look at NYC, how old "land improvements" get stuck.
> When you can tell Xrender to efficiently composite some pixmaps then there's really no reason to use sub-windows ever.

There is, or we would not be having subsurfaces on Wayland or this entire discussion in the first place.

Are you seriously arguing that the only reason to using windows in Xorg is to have composition? People were using Xshape/Xmisc and the like to handle the lack of alpha channels in the core protocol? This is not what I remember. I would be surprised if Xshape even worked on non-top level windows. heck, even MOTIF had windowless widgets (called gadgets iirc), and the purpose most definitely was not composition-related.
this is badass
> The whole point of money was to last longer than the expiring and perishable things it was used to pay for. The purchasing power of a dollar in the last century is about 1/500th of what it was when it was paid for the value someone created back then.

I agree that store of value is an important property of money. Although, I think money wasn't explicitly designed as you suggest. Modern money is a complex cultural phenomenon that evolved over several stages. I think there's so much confusion about money because people refer to different stages. If we wanted to have really stable money, we could fix prices of goods. But I guess this doesn't make much sense in a dynamic economy (how do we compare a basket of goods from 1920 with one in 2020 which includes iPhones).

> The real estate bubble created by low interest rates is exactly what happens to everything else in an inflationary environment.

I wouldn't be so sure whether there's a real estate bubble. I think our current situation is different from the years before 2008 where people where actually buying houses in expectation to sell them at higher prices one year later. I would rather explain the real estate prices as adaptations of net present values to changes of the interest rate.

> Hedges include gold and metals, land, art and alternative assets, or like Wiemar [0], people just spend devalued money on gambling and prostitution.

I don't see how a reference to prostitution in Berlin in the 1920ies supports your economic argument. I guess the situation in the Weimar Republic is more complex than simply explaining inflation with printing of money. (As far as I know, monetarism was abandoned by major central banks long ago. The German Bundesbank tried it quite long though, not surprisingly.)

Germany lost WWI and had to pay for reparations. So it had to produce goods for which they didn't get foreign currency. Before the inflation really kicked in, the Reichsmark devalued already. Basically, the central bank didn't have any currency reserves to counter this. So everything imported became much more expensive. It probably also didn't help that Germany had to take care of wounded soldiers that weren't fully part of the workforce. In sum, the production capacity was hindered but there was excess demand.
Decoupling from OpenAI API is pretty easy. If Google came up with Gemini tomorrow and it was a much better model, people would find ways to change their pipeline pretty quickly.
So we are making progress to the future promised by Futurama.
It carries the same weight as press statements from Tesla on a semi never released into the hands of the public without NDAs.
Terabase Energy First Commercial (Robotic) Solar Installation
> And if the board wanted the company to be a pure research organization they should have acted much, much earlier

I mean sure. But if true that’s hardly an argument for why they shouldn’t do it now as the stakes grow increasingly higher.
> This is more sophisticated than a Markov process.

Nothing prevents a markov process from having a world model. A markov process lacks state and generates a sequence based on statistics and previous entries, so LLMs as they are now are markov processes.

Many of the dumb behaviors we see from LLMs today comes from their lack of internal state between tokens, so it don't remember what reason it had for generating the previous token and that means it can easily generate inconsistent answers. So LLMs being a markov process is an important point to highlight since it makes its thinking very different from how humans think.
I love my REI Traverse 60. Make sure you _go to_ REI or another store so they can measure you. When I looked on my own before an employee came over, I was looking at the wrong size. (Oh and REI might be evil [0], now, so YMMV).

I bet your guide covers it, but it might be worth taking a look at the NPS' recommended list [1].

In addition, for paper maps, you may need to know about areas of wilderness. Where applicable, the USDA (!) has topo maps you can download as PDF/TIFFs and freely print [2]. These are highly detailed maps but do not cover the whole of the US.

This is a great list. Thanks!

[0] https://www.startribune.com/rei-accused-of-labor-law-violati...

[1] https://www.nps.gov/articles/hiking-safety.htm#whattobring

[2] https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/rastergateway/states-region...
Professional games would place the whole text there and move some sort of marker through it to avoid the jarring transitions when an incoming word wraps to the next line. Small touches like these really stand out, and when they're not there you just feel like it's a shoddy product. It looks like a lot of work went into this otherwise, so they should really implement these kinds of easy fixes.
No, OpenAI won't kill RAG startups
>I know my world model is fundamentally incomplete. Even more foundationally, I know that there is a world, and when my world model and the world disagree, the world wins.

Yeah this isn't really true. There's not how humans work. For a variety of reasons, Plenty stick with their incorrect model despite the world indicating otherwise. In fact, this seems to be normal enough human behaviour. Everyone does it, for something or the other. You are no exception.

And yes LLMs can in fact tell truth from fiction.

GPT-4 logits calibration pre RLHF - https://imgur.com/a/3gYel9r

Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975

Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words - https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know - https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05221

The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824

Your argument seems to boil down to "they can't perform experiments" but that isn't true either.
Judging by the various threads on this topic, the current streaming reality isn't "a few bucks" and it actually involves quite a lot of cognitive overhead (exactly when you just want to be relaxing!). Neither do you have to go "trawling" for torrents - public trackers/catalogs easily get you the contemporary zeitgeist and its back catalog. But sure, keep on enjoying the simulated liberation of the corporate sandbox. My comment was meant for those on the fence.
Yup it's quite literally the world's most expensive parrot. (Mind you, a plain old parrot is not cheap either. But OpenAI is a whole other order of magnitude.)
It's also not complete: only a handful of functions are known to have functional encryption schemes.
Can we not link to scammy engineering blog articles with ads for scammy restaurant apps on top please?

Link to the source, or better yet, never link at all to anything related to Uber.
Well, installation prices correlate very well with efficiency. What was always a huge problem for perovskite cells, because they tend to be way less efficient.

They also suffer from lack of raw-material abundance and shorter lifetimes. But it may be possible to fix both of those too. The factory for perovskite cells should require much less initial investment, what is a huge limitation for silicon cells, so it could be revolutionary.
for some, Google was superior to the current iteration of Google
I feel that LLMs raise some very interesting challenges for anyone trying to figure out what it means to understand something and how we do it, but I am not yet ready to agree with Hinton.

For example, we are aware that some, but by no means all, of what people say is about an external world that may or may not conform to what the words say. We can also doubt that we have understood things correctly, and take steps to either confirm or refute our opinions. We see ourselves as entities in an external reality containing other individuals who also do this, and that we, and they, have a limited ability to influence what happens in that world. Do LLMs do these things, or is what they produce a result of having a lot of information about the purely formal properties of human language use, independently of semantics?
One class of alternatives you could also consider is narrow fonts like PragmataPro[1] (commercial) or Iosevka[2] (gratis, FOSS). Being able to fit more stuff onto the screen side-by-side is what enabled me to get as much into tmux as I have.

[1] https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/

[2] https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
you can get a long way just checking the slow query log every few days
A 1% land tax expires the land in 100 years.
Second Reality was truly a technical marvel and arguably represented the pinnacle of the PC demo scene. It’s amazing how much influential it has been and how it continues to endure some 30 years later. Not too shabby for a group of teenagers from Finland.

(And now I feel extra old realizing the original Second Reality was released 30 years ago.)

Aside: I first watched Second Reality on my PC at the time which was a 386/40DX. I must have watched it 100 times at least. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did upon booting it up was to watch Second Reality. I was amazed at how much I had been missing before; everything ran smoother and elements that had been truncated before were now visible. Yet even when it was on my old hardware it was still completely presentable. It’s a credit to the Future Crew coders that it could run so well on such disparate hardware.

Another aside: the Second Reality source code was released on GitHub for its 20th anniversary: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

There was a great 5-part blog series to decipher it:
https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/
the lengths google fans will go to not use a proper browser...
The article doesn't make this clear, but 关系 in Chinese is a very general word that can refer to any kind of relations/connections, not only between people but between institutions, abstract ideas, etc.
In my experience it’s not supposed to be that hard, unless you’re working at the cutting edge or on really hard problems. But from what you’ve written it seems like you’re struggling with basic stuff.

Maybe you’re still lacking fundamentals? Seems like your strategy so far has been to grind tutorials and crash courses. They will make you feel like you’re learning a lot in a short time but in the end you’ll still not know what you’re doing, and you’ll keep struggling when facing new problems that are outside of the scope of the tutorial.

Maybe you’re learning from low-quality resources? Yes, the internet is full of free resources but most of them are useless and actually harmful, and some curation is needed. Instead of studying the basics over and over from endless free online tutorial/courses, just learn them once, the right way, from a high-quality resource instead. See: teachyourselfcs.com
Don’t rely on half remembering how specific languages implement things, try and internalise the fundamentals. Go functions tend to return a tuple which is a product type, while rust’s result type is sum type. Product types contain. Both things (a result and an error) while a sum type contains a result or an error.
To what extent it Ilya the brains behind this entire wave?

As in – without him – this LLM craze, as we know it and as it has manifested – would not exist today?

My understanding is that he is at the center of all of it.

NY Mag said that Sam Altman is the Oppenheimer, I think it's Ilya.
> consider desalination plants and stuff like that is insane when we'd have enough if not for the above.

Desalination powered by renewables (offshore wind is one option) is a good choice in California, as it doesn't get nearly as much water as it should (think forest fires). As for the desert, just by installing solar panels (that could feed the grid where desalination operates) you reduce loss of water by evaporation and make agriculture a lot easier while still getting energy for free.

And even when the solar panels get so old and inefficient they don't produce much power, they still produce something that's very scarce in a desert: shade.

By then, I would expect the desert to be a lot less desertified.
People often don’t believe me when I say I can’t remember faces. I can compensate mostly by remembering the shape of someone’s hairline/hairstyle, and also ears. I also recognise people by voice much easier and I pay attention to the way people walk. That is usually enough information to recognise people. I can’t visualise faces, and even in my dreams people don’t even have faces, they have fogginess where a face should be.
I had an awkward moment at the supermarket a couple of months back when I didn’t recognise a person I was dating who waved to me, and I was confused so looked behind me thinking they were waving to someone behind me, and then continued shopping and ignored them. They texted me afterwards annoyed that I snubbed them. They did not believe me when I said I didn’t recognise them. We’re no longer dating… lol.
It also used to cause me anxiety as a kid because I would get lost in crowds and in queues because I couldn’t recognise my mum, and I hadn’t yet learned strategies for telling people apart.
I otherwise have a perfectly good enough memory. It’s just some weird brain thing. I always used to think it was because I just didn’t care what people looked like.
Thanks. Not your job to provide them, but Wikipedia, especially about a white-hot topic, is not reliable in my book. I will keep an eye out.

Still, if you want to persuade people of extraordinary claims, you'll of course need very strong evidence.
The problem with cable was you couldn't have 'basic cable + FX' or 'basic + AMC' it was $30 for lame selection of mostly crap and then $80 - $100 for anything better.
Why Is the College Board Pushing to Expand Advanced Placement?
Hack is very underrated and awesome. Fira Code is nice, so is Adobe Source Code Pro [0], and Iosevka [1]. Yet, Berkeley is truly at its own level.

[0]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro

[1]: https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
Directory Entry Lookup in Ext4
E/Acc vs. Decels
Inflation is a good implementation of this.

The period of high inflation circa '70s was also the most equal economy of the recent decades. It's all been downhill from there
I taught myself to code in high school and then did the 5 year CS degree at university. School taught me a lot of interesting stuff that I probably would've never picked up on my own, and gave me a much more grounded perspective on the entire field. But very little that was directly relevant for enteprise programming (which I've been doing professionally for over a decade by now).
Julia as a unifying end-to-end workflow language on the Frontier exascale system
Did they stop making Bud Light? Did Anheuser-Busch go out of business? Seems like it's still the largest brewer in the world and still pulling in billions every year. I'm sure they'd have preferred to make even more money on top of the massive piles of cash they're swimming in, but they're sure as hell not hurting.
South Korea used it for their COVID contact tracing system.
I have searched on and off for a similarly fun game as follows:

- the splash screen says "congrats: you've been recognized for outstanding work. Click 'next' to finalize your bonus details with HR."

then when the user moves the mouse to the next button, it evades the pointer so you can never click it.

This joke was play on me when I was consulting at AT&T in the 90s.

There are variations on the setup ... eg. won lotto ... email from wife ... won free car ...

And in a couple cases I've seen the "next button" temporarily change into a Dilbert looking boss with a snide remark before going back on the run.

Never found it again ...
With certain kinds of antennas you can differentiate distinct emitters on the same frequency if there is enough spatial separation between them.

Just like with a single radio telescope you can simultaneously watch two closely located radio-galaxies emitting on the same frequency.
But! With cable, if you didn't buy the upper tier packages, you may have missed out on some great shows/networks (e.g., HBO). And cable companies often use contracts to make downgrading expensive. With streaming services, cancelling after you've binge watch the shows you're interested in comes with no penalty.
What you count as success depends on what your goal is. It's entirely possibly SpaceX could have thrown extra billions at it and had a higher chance of successful orbit, but that doesn't mean they deemed that the most efficient use of time and money to advance the project. Sometimes it's far less costly in time and effort to start it up and see where it fails rather than look it over another 20 times and wrack your brain for anything you've missed before.

When I think I've gotten pretty far in a program I'm writing and there's even a small chance of it partially functioning, I'll often fire it up to get feedback on the errors I wasn't aware of as early as possible. Some of those may indicate larger structural changes that are required in the worst case, and the earlier I can learn about those the better.