skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
we're actually just too addicted to the internet of today to spend any time in the throwback internet.
I’ll have to add some of those things to the reading list. 2001 (the movie) was indeed a great depiction of an AI that isn’t exactly embodied and also isn’t effectively a human in robot skin. It does run into the similar tropes I was getting at though where AI feels it knows what is best for us even if that involves disobeying us.
Aspects of this article were surprisingly good. This part was not one of them, though. What's already been released publicly is feels "rooted in the realm of science fiction".
I thought Planetary Annihilation was a spiritual successor to both TA and SC
No, I don’t think they do, which is another point in the “alignment is a very big problem” column.

The problem of defining “what’s a good outcome” is a sub problem of alignment.
This is really good journalism. There are a ton of interesting details in here that haven't been reported elsewhere, and it has all of the hallmarks of being well researched and sourced.

The first clue is this: "In conversations between The Atlantic and 10 current and former employees at OpenAI..."

When you're reporting something like this, especially when using anonymous sources (not anonymous to you, but sources that have good reasons not to want their names published), you can't just trust what someone tells you - they may have their own motives for presenting things in a certain way, or they may just be straight up lying.

So... you confirm what they are saying with other sources. That's why "10 current and former employees" is mentioned explicitly in the article.

Being published in the Atlantic helps too, because that's a publication with strong editorial integrity and a great track record.
I've started doing this as well this year, waking between 0530 and 0700. I work out within an hour of getting up.

I'm usually ready for work between 0930 and 1030. It required a LOT of training (I am not, historically, a morning person) but I have been super consistent with it for the last few months.

On a plus side, I can get up without an alarm now on a consistent basis. On the minus side, I now get super sleepy at 2200, which makes hanging out late very difficult.

The alternative was starting work when I got up, but the flipside to this was my workouts getting on super late if I got hit with a late meeting. I still work out like this while I'm traveling. It usually means I have to skip on team dinner, which sucks.
>neither of which use alarmist terms like "existential threat"

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk

Not sure you're making a meaningful distinction here.

- - -

Of course we all have our own heuristics for deciding who's worth paying attention to. Credentials are one heuristic. For example, you could argue that investing in founders like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Wozniak would be a bad idea because none of them had completed a 4-year degree.

In any case, there are a lot of credentialed people who take Eliezer seriously -- see the MIRI team page for example: https://intelligence.org/team/ Most notable would probably be Stuart Russell, coauthor of the most widely used AI textbook (with Peter Norvig), who is a MIRI advisor.
Well, he could just execute you know.
The Urgent Case for Sabbaticals for All (2021)
Their contract? Yes. Their lack of any technical innovations or competing AI product? No.
> political removal due to prioritizing success over safety

I don't really see the parallel.

It seems impossible to have success in self-driving without safety. Cars that are unsafe will literally kill people, which will then kill the program as seen with Uber.

The AI safety/success tradeoff seems far more nuanced. The threats are abstract, largely hypothetical, and safety seems to be directly in opposition with success. So it's easy to see why product-oriented people would feel justified in making a call to ignore or down-prioritize safety, in a way that nobody running a self-driving car program can afford to.
Yeah I have to agree. Go back a few hundred years and it’s basically all war all the time. Now it’s only happening in parts of the world
The more important story than a "failure of capitalism" is Altman's influence and maneuvering as a CEO.

He had certain positions, and pushed them just gradually enough for OpenAI to end up where it is today. A more zealous capitalist would have gotten fired unceremoniously long ago.
Page 321 goes into how to translate R things to C/C++ things. It’s trivial to do the same for python. ChatGPT could do it.
Yeah any tech company that had any bad news to drop should have done it Friday.
Pre-recordered cassettes were generally bad. But buying the vinyl album and recording it yourself was a different experience. The blanks were higher quality. The quality of the recording also noticeably better.
Re resurgence: 100% spot on.

And here's why:

https://globalbrief.ca/2020/06/zeal-and-chinas-wolf-warrior-...
Wasted semiconductor production, wasted resources shipping mining and GPUs all over then dumping them when something more efficient comes along…
The accident was one thing, but Cruise's response to regulators about the accident escalated the heat. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/board-...
Other than for images and video, when in practice do you want to do that?

If you're talking to an API, you should know what that API can produce.

And if you're talking to a webpage, this isn't an issue.
I knew people who worked over there and didn’t have nice things to say about anyone in upper management. I actually had to tell a recruiter from Cruise who was actively trying to get me to interview, no thank you.
Hiding a video from regulators has nothing to do with faking it til you make it
Dig deeper, dude. I'm not sure if you're serious or being disingenuous, but the fallout over that incident has been in tech news including several HN threads for the past 6+ weeks.
The next Bitcoin. Energy usage will be argued about by all sides.
Frenzied speculation swirls after ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased breakthrough that pushed 'the frontier of discovery forward' - just ONE day before he was fired amid reports he was seeking investors for new AI chip venture
Show me a mathematical proof then.
If anything it’ll be a subtle bug that wipes us out.

The 2003 Northeast blackout that affected 50 million people was partially caused by a race condition. https://www.theregister.com/2004/04/08/blackout_bug_report/
> What’s really unfortunate is I worked with many people who worked with Kyle and no one had a single good thing to say about him. And I’ve often heard that before with people who knew other CEOs but they kinda grudgingly admitted they did what was needed to get it done.

I worked with Kyle at Justin.tv. He's great. A good guy and a tremendous engineer.

Now you know someone who does, so you can stop saying that.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-c...
Discovered, not newly evolved. It doesn't matter that we know about a species or not, that causes no change in the level of biodiversity. Species becoming extinct on the other hand affects biodiversity.
You are missing what happened next, which Cruise tried to cover up.
Wow this thing is wicked fast!
While reading chapter 6 of that book, I was inspired to make this digital scatter graph trying to implement his "data-ink maximization" principle: https://tehshrike.github.io/classy-graph/

It was a good exercise.

I really like that book.
Can you share some nuggets about how did you migrate a bigger codebase from 2 to 3 in less than 40 hours?

I tried with a Django codebase and didn't know where to go.. 2to3 tools they provided didn't help much. Can you give steps involved? I'll dig deeper on each step.
Thanks
I'm sure I've gotten quite a bit of valuable information from the site, but like most information on the internet, I consume a lot of it, and it disappears almost as quickly. Some of it sticks around, but not a whole lot. It's forgotten shortly as I've already moved on to consume the next bit of information.
The current top post (use roughly) does a pretty good job of it!
Termux is the main thing I miss when I’m using iOS instead of Android.

It’s a shame that Google tightening Android’s security made Termux stuck with an older API (this is why also it is not available on the Play store anymore).

Because of this, I’m not sure if it has a long term future. I’m sure the community will do its best but most likely we will get a less capable version similar to what happened with ad blocking on Chrome.
That's an interesting fact about the ketchup. What other everyday similarities like that did you notice?
That's why you always dial *70 first!
Right. Exhibit A is Steve Ballmer infamously chanting “developers, developers, developers”
A country with an interesting VAT/sales tax is Thailand, where large shops and chains and places in malls will add tax to the final price (and service charge sometimes) while smaller places will not. (I’m talking restaurants, VAT is included in online stores and I’m pretty sure for physical goods.)

I think this is because of the minimum turnover for VAT[0] at least on paper, but there are places obviously making a lot more that just don’t bother with it, so there is probably a lot of adventurous accounting as well.

Lovely place, you should add it to your 30+.

[0]: https://www.aseanbriefing.com/news/a-guide-to-taxation-in-th...
IMF says central bank digital currencies can replace cash
> One unfortunate accident

I think it was covering up for the accident that caused regulators to pull the plug.

If that were traced directly to the CEO, then he's out for good reason.

Otherwise, the CEO likely has to take the fall anyway to satisfy regulators who want consequences for executives who don't ensure regulatory submissions are credible.
I know it's a theme, MacAskill discusess it in his book. In practice, this is the direction all the "AI safety" departments and organisations seem to be going into.

A world where everyone is paperclipped is probably better than one controlled by psychopathic totalitarian human overlords supported by AI, yet the direction of current research seems to leading us into the latter scenario.
I have this gut feeling Apple will buy Qualcomm in the near future. I hear stories in different forums that Qualcomm seems to have some layoffs and churn lately and so I think this might be a sign of them floundering. Yeah they still have a large share of the market, but Apple has the money and it would probably be seen as a win for both companies.
What does “early access” even mean nowadays? Seems like devs can label (or not label) a game as “early access” whenever they want. I’m guessing most do it as a way to set lower expectations to minimize bad reviews.

I think Factorio was early access longer than necessary, and Satisfactory also feels like it’s well beyond “early access”.

E.g. it’s not like “early access” means that they’re still making changes to the game, and stop making changes once the label is gone. I’ve seen “early access” games get abandoned (or even never see another update), and I’ve seen games out of “early access” still continue getting several updates.
Yeah you’re right. I also like it when others post high quality links.
I don't think the comparison to the image example holds up; while something like a random-ish behavior is at play when it comes to hypothesis generation, the hypothesis evaluation is a different matter. It does seem to reason about its own capabilities intelligently, at least insofar as one can detect coherent reasoning as represented in language.

The program you mention using an array might be a thin version of what I've demonstrated here, but it operates on much the same principle.

Great question about parallels. I suppose the closest biological parallel would be a human brain reasoning about an external agent's character based on behaviors just observed. (But it quickly falls apart past that: unlike human neuroplasticity, because GPT-4 has no mechanism to update its own weights, knowledge about the agent being evaluated is lost at each new inference unless explicitly included in-context.)
I don’t understand, but I suppose I’ll have to accept not understanding. The article vaguely gestures towards some sort of misrepresentation, but doesn’t elaborate. Thank you for pointing it out though.
Can someone make the case using logical arguments on why drexlspivey is any better or worse than no drexlspivey? Why is an ecosystem in equilibrium with drexlspivey better than one without drexlspivey?
Typical U.S. homebuyer earns $107K, is more likely to be a single woman
I wanted to be an astronaut, or the next Jacques Cousteau, or a rockstar guitarist, or a race car driver. None of these things happened.

But I can play guitar pretty well. I work in software and IT. 63yo.
That's 4x the amount of buy-in than is required to fire most people.
Milking out his position until the last possible moment
Various goods are already tax-exempt or tax-reduced, like groceries.
Those computers were fun to use!

The one I used had a joystick built right into the keyboard, and it ran a CNC programming environment.

Data I/O was paper tape via serial and data cassette. Ours did not have the floppy or fast refresh graphics options.

2048x2048 vector space! The big CRT could resolve most of that when well tuned.

The work process was:

Load editor from tape cartridge

Type it in, or read text from paper tape.

I had punched a fair number of shortcut G-codes and I would use them to get the bones of a new program started.

Write finished program text (g-code) to paper tape. That could and should include comments. (We put a setup sheet on the master tape, for example) This was a master.

Make another stripped down one, and this is production.

Prep a tape for reading by sticking the beginning of program end into the reader and put the reader into handshake mode.

Read it back to validate against program in RAM.

Or...

Load backplotter/ simulator. Prep program tape for reading.

Run the simulator, plotter. If it was a master tape, it would know the tooling setup and just draw all the operations to the CRT. And because it was a storage tube, those all would display and one could see what metal gets cut out easy enough.

This worked fairly well!

Once it was done, the production tape went into a can and was moved to a library. That was a whole wall of cabinets filled with little plastic canisters containing paper tape programs for everything.

1Mhz 6500 CPU.

And like I said, the Tek terminals were just fun to use.
Model training can at least follow the sun or clean energy forecasts. Latency from distance isn’t an issue as it would be for serving users requests. You can stage data for training runs. If you train during periods where the price of power goes negative, you get paid to take the power.

These workloads are going to run, so best to run them where the impact is lowest for the effort involved.

https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center...

https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partners...

https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/how-companies-reduce-th...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02243
I suppose if this widely believed perception is true there can't possibly be any danger in scaling the model up a few thousand times. Except of course all those logical reasoning datasets the model is acing, but I guess it just memorized them all. Its only autocomplete on steroids why are all these people smarter than me worried about it, I don't understand.
Looks like YouTube is already detecting this or has some logic to detect that the ads were played at a different speed.

Try moving through a video when this extension is active and you can see that the advertisement is getting active for almost every possible forward / reverse time selection on the video timeline.

It is just too many blank screens and though it saves a couple of seconds in the actual advertisement watching space, it does provide an unpleasant experience of watching the black screen for a few seconds.

I can live with that (and most should be!), but wanted to record this observation so that it get's to the developer's attention for improvements (if possible!)

Hope it helps.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336374

The reason AI alignment is challenging is because we're trying to make accurate predictions about unusual scenarios that we have essentially zero data about. No one can credibly claim expertise on what would constitute evidence of a worrisome anomaly. Jeremy Howard can't credibly say that a sudden drop in the loss function is certainly nothing to worry about, because the entire idea is to think about exotic situations that don't arise in the course of ordinary machine learning work. And the "loss" vs "loss function" thing is just silly gatekeeping, I worked in ML for years -- serious people generally don't care about minor terminology stuff like that.
I don't understand why this is significant. The context is the whole conversation. If you fill that context with examples of ChatGPT functionality it seems kind of obvious to me that the responses to the "who are you?" question would bias towards the examples in the context.

This doesn't really seem like it is learning through the course of the iterations, just selecting different aspects of information it already has based on the way the iterations go. For example if you take one of the new elements added to the iteration 20 response: it adds "generating creative content" to it's list of things it can do to assist. If I ask a fresh model "Is part of your purpose to generate creative content?" it answers yes. Same for the other new additions. It doesn't need the examples to know what it can do.
I worked at Cruise (I left about 2.5 years ago) and I have the opposite impression about Kyle. Kyle was a very charismatic leader who was really in the trenches. Unlike a lot of CEOs he was really visible in the office, he would drop in on meetings if he had breaks in his calendar, he was active on Jira and Slack, etc. Even though I was just a rank-and-file engineer I was in a number of meetings with him and some of the engineers would meet with him often. It was pretty clear that he had his finger on the pulse of the company and understood what was going on in engineering in a pretty deep way.

Some of these are qualities that I could see leading to someone thinking he was "aimless" or a "confused mess", but these are also things that engender a lot of respect from employees. For better or worse his presence was very much felt by engineers, and I think everyone thought that he was very technical.

I think Kyle's departure is going to hit hard for a lot of the engineers working on onboard software. It's been reported that they are spending something like $250M/quarter so in order to keep the ship afloat they are going to need to raise funding soon. It's hard to think of a worse situation they could be fundraising in, which I assume is going to mean a massive down round, which is going to further dishearten the people working there.
I made one of these in the 80s using the dick smith fun way to electronics kit, that are alas now defunct.
How do you get started with that?
My point is don’t say it can’t be done. It can be done, you just choose not to do it.
Weird - this leaves out the most worrying part of the incident; the woman was pinned under the cruise vehicle and ended up being dragged under the vehicle as the vehicle started moving again.

Furthermore, Cruise attempted to cover up the fact that the car dragged the woman. Now that I refresh myself on the details of the situation, it seems you have the "cleaned" PR statement that was pushed by Cruise and had omitted the above details

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-10-26/cruise-rob...
I recently built a new PC. For the first time it has no CD drive.

I have a modest vinyl record collection.

I lost track of my cassettes when we got a CD burner. But my dad still has a collection of tape media and the associated hardware.

I wonder what will drive the nostalgic revival of CDs.
Sure it will yep. I'm pretty confident it won't be though.

I am half-Argentine and a student of history. Both things tell me it will be a disaster.

For what it's worth, I'm utterly opposed to the corrupt useless Peronists. Their centre right rivals are pretty awful too. Argentina was lead to the abyss by decades of political failure and corruption. Now, in desperation, they've rolled the dice and summoned a catastrophe.
We can pile on anecdata, but the unemployment rate being near record lows points to this being a workers' market.
Everything from aunties throwing shade to diminished marriage prospects (in a country where 90% of marriages are arranged).
Yes, this should not be discounted. Cruise has stunningly terrible reviews from verified employees. Based on my dataset from Blind, they were top 5% lowest ratings. Clearly morale there has been very bad, and at least since 2018.

https://www.teamblind.com/company/Cruise/
Someone should compile a master list of various forms of humans deceiving each other.
Text really doesn't take up that much space, and in addition it compresses pretty well.

The entire English language Wikipedia is only around 60GB in a format that can be readily searched and randomly accessed (ZIM), for example: https://kiwix.org/
Let's see what happens. The big issue is government spending which causes the printing of more money which leads to inflation. Changing to the dollar will help but it's going to lead to many government programs ending and a lot of misery for many in the lower rung of the economy. It sounds like a good fix but eventually, we'll see people demonstrating against the government and asking for change. That will be the real test to see if they can really follow the reforms they voted for today. I suspect we'll be seeing a back tract to the same. I wish them luck.
That's the problem: they don't respect the Vary header for HTML or JSON documents, just for images.

It's a documented decision that they've made: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/concepts/cache-contr...
Ah, thank you. Them not disclosing the full video from the outset was a mistake, but it’s surprising that it escalated so much. A human driver could’ve easily made the same mistake — pulling over isn’t uncommon after an accident, and there’s no way to detect someone under your car other than getting out, which is usually not very safe.

Oh well. Maybe next decade.
You cannot apply the logic of tech vc on cultural production.

Artists don't need studio management services. They need a profile in NYT. If you actually gave them a gallerist and a dedicated pro agent, then yeah that could launch some careers. But that would need to be non public information, because that type of manufacture goes against authenticity.

Art is nothing more than branding and social connections. Absolutely nothing more.
Bitcoin and other PoW crypto burn energy by design and found few to no enduring use cases.

Talking about the energy usage of AI is like talking about the growing energy usage of lighbulbs at the turn of the 20th century. It's a byproduct of adoption and reduced-energy solutions will readily be taken up if/when found.
> I can also probably find some news reports of cannibals nabbing people at the grocery store. Does not mean I am going to avoid shopping.

Please find any such instances over the past 6 months and list them. If length(your list) > length(my list), you win.

Yeah, this has turned into a length measuring contest.
Lul – The creative AI bot that turns your ideas into beautiful images
Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers
More directly, the analog LaserDisc that came with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project