skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh god no, born in '89 and went straight from college to an executive role and stayed there.

Like it's not a bad thing, I'm not implying any kind of judgement but keeping those things in context helps you know that "K." means something totally different coming from your dad.
Asking "why" may lead to really new physics, though. I assume the reason for discovering the theory of relativity was asking "Why is the speed of light constant in all directions".
How do you define understanding when predicting the next color?
Because, even in failure, there's progress. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" is often attributed to Edison, without whom, we wouldn't have the lightbulb. In order to make progress, you need to try. And if you never fail, you're not trying hard enough. Would it be better if it hadn't failed? Absolutely. But better to try and fail than never try.
This is an interesting comparison. I've also had more magic time from ChatGPT than I did with cell phones, both before and with touch screens.

Yet, cell phones are now in use by billions. AI may not have yet even "crossed the chasm." It's not a given that will happen e.g. because of complexity, user indifference, or high costs
No, I meant the potential to see much worse for children: hardcore porn, beheadings, horrific stuff.
> there could be incentives to hoard/save it

Yes -- for a while. Not forever. This is a feature, not a bug. Hoarding/saving for short periods of time (relative to human life spans) is a good thing. It helps damp out transients. Hoarding/saving for long periods of time is bad because it discourages people from taking risks by putting resources to productive use.
Are the folks that build it the most objective observers?

You can call a duck an eagle all day long but that does not make it an eagle.
No we don't. No it's not "magic". No we don't understand what the black box is doing.
To be fair, in most other nouns, adding an apostrophe and an s at the end can both be short for "is" and signify the possessive form (e.g., "Tim's a jerk" means "Tim is a jerk," but "Tim's house" means the house Tim lives in).

By analogy, it makes sense for "it's" to both mean the possessive form and to be short for "it is," but instead we spell the possessive form as "its." Since the difference is only in writing, not pronunciation, it makes sense for a native speaker to forget it.

I see the same mistake with "who's" and "whose." The latter is the possessive form (e.g. "Whose phone is this?") and the former is a contraction of "who is" (e.g., "The only kid who's sitting quietly"). I see people write "who's" instead of "whose," for probably the same reason, since relative pronouns also replace normal nouns. Here's a comparison with the word order changed to make it obvious ("who" replaces "Mom" here):

This phone is Mom's.
This phone is who's/whose?

I know the normal word order is "Whose phone is this?" though.
Well, in California, they're kinda in the worst of both worlds right now: not state-run but heavily state-regulated, while still trying to make a profit. It's not really working out. They have the burden of state rules without full state support, and can't utilize normal economic rules because of the state limitations. It's just this weird, uncomfortable no-man's land. Between the wildfires and renewables, their rates went up nearly 2x in the last few years and they still went bankrupt.

I think some might argue for full privatization, but does that ever work out with a natural monopoly (the transmission portions at least, not so much with generation)? It's like if Comcast provided electricity.

I don't think I'm far left enough to want to nationalize everything as a matter of course -- the state bureaucracy, as you imply, isn't great at staying nimble -- but something as mundane and essential as basic infra? Sure, why not.

From an equitable services standpoint, right now they're basically charging everyone (via rates) to pay for the actions for a few (solar homeowners), while shrugging off the wildfire situation with no real accountability. As a state enterprise they'd have to have more transparency and accountability (unless they're the Pentagon), and would be subsidized by the existing taxation structures that are already progressive. Right now, the skyrocketing electricity costs in the state are pretty terrifying to behold (I don't even live there), especially if they want to move everyone to EVs. It's just a mess...
You could also credit Marxism for workers rights.

Having utopian ideologies NEVER doing good in the world would require some very careful boundary drawing.
When this story first appeared, it was noted that the woman who owned the painting had lived in Compiègne. Compiègne was the site of a royal residence from 1374 until the Revolution, and the site of a Carmelite convent (which received significant royal support) from 1641 until 1792. The painting could well have belonged to the convent, been sold off locally when it was closed, and either stayed in the family of the original purchaser or made its way through various local antique shops. So there's a decent chance that much of the painting's history, including its last religious use, took place in France.
By being very good. Mostly the Uber-geniuses thing, but I wouldn't call them geniuses. You do have a bit of the harder working but it's quite minor and of course sometime you benefit from being in the right place at the right time (luck). I'd say elite network is probably the least important conditional on you having a decent network that you can get at any top 20 school if you put in the effort (be involved in tech societies etc.)
Just being optimistic about your plan works.
If you removed a watermark, could it be considered to be a violation of the DMCA?
That's really great feedback, thanks!
That is the digital economy of the future. Tagged credits, some with expirations and other constraints (perhaps geospatial).

It's the only reasonable way to implement something like UBI: give everyone X "food credits" and Y "housing credits" each week. There would still be fraud and "credit laundering" to get around the expirations, but the overall waste would be tiny compared to the legacy finance system.
Grain is quite stable under the right conditions (dry, cool), which is one of the reasons there can be a futures market for it and sales can happen over the winter and even the spring following a harvest.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the origin of currency began with grain.
TC, my base isn’t that high.
If you can’t protect your IP, you don’t have a reason to develop it in the first place.
> You would realize that all we are doing is using statistics to predict what the next item might be.

I agree that Hinton's original quote doesn't make sense to me either. I suspect he would leverage the phrase "really good" to explain the difference between ChatGPT and, say, a Markov chain. I think that's a little disingenuous, if that's how he means it, but I don't know if I'm right about that.

But I also do not agree that humans use statistics to predict what the next item in a series might be. As evidence, there is the classic example of asking people to predict the next coin toss in the series: "heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads...". They'll either guess heads because it's come up so many times already, or because they assume the coin isn't fair, or tails because it's "overdue" to come up, but none of those are based on statistics per se.
Are there any rules against having a different take on things?
"The player survived, how did he do it?"

Seems to work most of the time
It is very easy to separate humans from LLMs. Humans created math without being given all the answers beforehand. LLMs can't do that yet.

When an LLM can create math to solve a problem, we will be much closer to AGI.
>The "new" dollars would be worth more, so the people at the top of the flow would have more advantages than those at the bottom.

That's happening even now with inflation, even if the mechanism is less obvious.

It's called the Cantillon Effect.
> A fundamental decision we've made for the pganalyze Indexing Engine is that we break down queries into smaller parts we call "scans". Scans are always on a single table, and you may be familiar with this concept from reading an EXPLAIN plan. For example, in an EXPLAIN plan you could see a Sequential Scan or Index Scan, both representing a different scan method for the same scan on a given table.

Sequential scan == Full table scan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_table_scan
From the article, Gelman's money quote is this: " So I’m not knocking auto-complete; I’m just disagreeing with Hinton’s statement that “by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re actually forcing it to understand.” As a person who does a lot of useful associative reasoning and also a bit of logical understanding, I think they’re different, both in how they feel and also in what they do."
I see a lot of San Franciscans online complain about homeless people leaving their feces and used needles in the streets and harassing people going about their lives, I don't see so many complaints about them eating food. Surely an approach that maximises the freedom for all would be one that criminalizes the actually harmful behaviour, rather than going after the segment of society whose existence correlates strongly with that behaviour. It just seems like going after Tony Soprano by putting italians into internment camps, rather than devoting police activity to capturing mafia criminals
Reminds me of this scene from Westworld (slightly NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k
I'm pointing out the disconnect in the conversation: If you say I'm not smart enough to solve a math problem, and I use a python script to solve it written by a smarter person, whether "I" solved it is a matter of interpretation.

By not discussing this I felt the above poster was leaving out some key details.
The Apollo missions were certainly an achievement worthy of getting memorialised.

I also think that, given the size of the Apollo landers, if SpaceX had actually wanted to they could've redone those missions years ago with a Falcon Heavy and a variant of the Crew Dragon design.
I have a copy of this. I love the old Photoshop. It does the job well. I tried new Photoshop and it ruined my workflow. It had obscure functionality/features I am not familiar with, and I am too lazy to learn all the newfangled features. I tried it on my friend's computer and they have an Adobe subscription, so it wasn't a 'warez' release. And now apparently they're tacking on AI features which sound good, but possibly over-engineered now.
This is really cool. I like how the headline is clickbait so people get a negative impression from it, while it's literally a great positive thing.
I have some ideas and I'm working on it, can't say more than that for now. But I'm definitely not the only one. There are several Open Source projects, at a minimum, using LLMs with the same aim.

Back when you were 13 and programming on your Sinclair, LLMs were like science fiction.
Yes we should absolutely talk about that because it's a key contributor to a lot of the worry about letting Sam continue to go around and do stuff like strong arming the US government in public. He's getting high on his own supply. And I don't think he is going to be allowed to continue fucking around like that. And that goes for any scientists that that have joined up in his apocalyptic and extremely dangerous worldview as well.
> when I speak am I just spitting out the next word that makes sense or is there more to it.

There is more to it. Specifically you are doing so to advance towards a specific goal. LLMs don't have goals. They just pick from a list of likely tokens - based on their training data - at random to generate the next token.
Money do expire! There is inflation...

I would like similar system for land ownership and buildings. Property taxes at level of 5%. In China land can not be owned, but only leased for 70 years.
It does, it's called inflation.
> Nil panics are found to be an especially pervasive form of runtime errors in Go programs. Uber’s Go monorepo is no exception to this, and has witnessed several runtime errors in production because of nil panics, with effects ranging from incorrect program behavior to app outages, affecting Uber customers.

Insane that Go had decades of programming mistakes to learn from but it chose this path.

Anyway, at least Uber is out there putting out solid bandaids. Their equivalent for Java is definitely a must-have for any project.
Why is "using statistics" mutually exclusive with "understanding"? It would help to carefully define terms. Note that "understanding" doesn't mean it's necessarily conscious.

These systems learn high-level representations/abstractions of concepts we humans also use as part of our cognition. The concept of an object, an intuitive physics, the role of specific objects. I don't criticize him for using the word "understanding" to describe this.
Call me cynical but I have a strong feeling that the wealthy elite who are already paying an entire cottage industry's worth of six-figure or more finance professionals and lawyers to dodge taxes will find a way to make this work for them too, while it creates an even stronger barrier to entering the truly monied classes from whatever remains of the middle class.

If you want to get money moving in the economy again, we already know how to do that. Tax the shit out of the wealthy in such a way that they can't weasel out of it, and turn that money over to the people, be it through hiring them for public works projects, more and wider spread research grants, Universal Basic Income, or economic stimulus. We have tons of mechanisms to move money "down the hierarchy" as Dr. Peterson would say, but the problem is all of our politicians and media are owned by the very rich, and so taking money from the very rich is not on the table, which is how you do that. So we're left with this entire group of two professionals scratching their heads as to how we solve the problem of "the rich have too much money and the poor don't have enough" without having the rich give the poor money, which rather predictably lands at "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

I'm not even necessarily arguing pro or con here (though if you're curious, I'm extremely pro) I'm just saying that the rich accumulating too much is doing exactly what economists have always said it will do: it stalls the economy, and it will continue to do that. No amount of thumb on the scale by the rich will change this fundamental fact, and even some of them are saying this. If you totally strip mine the consumer base in the never ending pursuit of number-go-up, eventually you have no one left to sell your products to and then the entire game is over.
We understand the architecture but we don't understand the weights.
Good job and it's sad we have to scroll down this far to find the right answer!
Thanks, I had no idea they had so many models.

The car they bought looks really good too: https://youtu.be/kDRDNRuDnOA?si=DPzacq2fMcrJf-dj&t=250 (BYD Yuan PLUS, $21k, 480 km range).
Issues is where you find all the people with issues...
I think people get tricked by the forward pass mechanics into thinking a single generation is comparable to a human thought process.

I think we have a llm like mechanism we can employ and lean on as heavily as we like, but we also have an executive function, like thousands of specialized instant Boolean checks, which can adjust and redirect the big talky model’s context on the fly.

My hunch is it’s turtles all the way down. “Gut feelings” are hyper-optimized ASICS with tiny parameter counts, but all using the same intelligence mechanisms.

Extrapolating from that hunch, we are already witnessing AGI, and in fact we’ve started at the top.

I believe that current llms are actually far far superior to a human language center and current architectures are more than sufficient in terms of raw intelligence.

The challenge that remains is to understand, train, integrate, and orchestrate all the different flavors of intelligence that humans wield so elegantly and naturally as to make them opaque to our own understanding.
This just in:

Researchers are vastly more likely to read, and therefore cite, papers in languages that they understand fluently.
The thing is, apps for TVs work relativley well. If I could run something in an RPI that accepts infrared remote control as an input device and have run all the drm-y media services, and have it work reliably with low maintenance, I would much prefer that!

If Amazon makes their custom Linux OS open source and allow users to modify and update the fire tv sticks, that would be even better!
OTOH, doing something that only humans have done thus far would be a huge step in demonstrating understanding.

Does that mean when a computer outputs a new proof it understands?
The thing that's always felt slow to me in GTK was resizing windows, not getting pixels to the screen. I'm wondering if adding all these composited surfaces adds a cost when resizing the windows and their associated out of process surfaces.
But it also increases the chances that significant art pieces are purchased by museums and that the public is given access to them, which is a net good that I consider far more valuable than auction fairness.
Check your car insurance, personal damage is insured at double sigit millions, for example in Germany. So yes, cars are fully insured. Nuclear isn't and never was, insurance maths knows no mercy.
realistically, our wifes and family will almost never make backups, and probably most of us hackers either, it ll stay on todo or as implemented but now broken script.
I want you to be right. But why do you think you're more qualified to say how to make AI safe than the board of a world-leading AI nonprofit?
I hope AI will end up being a bit less murderous
Yes, ish. There's a few core traits you could apply to them all though.

I'm not saying Trump is going to murder millions of Jews.

What I am saying is that trump is about personal power at the expense of democracy. That he will do things his way, come what may.

That's also an element of why people vote for him. They want a 'strong' leader. But strong leaders don't make good democratic leaders, because democracy gets in their way.
i've heard a ton of aphex twin and disasterpeace, one of my favorite songs being compass, and i've never even thought about this. cool to see it's hidden in such a beautiful song
> if stop 365 subscription, will lose all content?

Precisely. That’s the point: the apps are the gateway drug, the goal is complete and perpetual dependence on the platform. As long as you keep paying, you can access your data. Stop at any point and wave your digital history bye bye.
Microsoft could unilaterally term the OpenAI agreement and let OpenAI fight them in court due to this substantial and material event. If OpenAI doesn’t have the cash on hand to survive the legal fight, the non profit dies eventually when they exhaust their resources.

OpenAI only had resources because of Microsoft, and they bit the hand that feeds them.
How sure are you that they aren't? Don't forget you are describing your/a model.
I'm pretty sure this was the entire point of the Paperclip Optimizer parable. That is that generalized intelligence doesn't have to look like or have any of the motivations that humans do.

Human behavior is highly optimized to having a meat based shell it has to keep alive. The vast majority of our behaviors have little to nothing to do with our intelligence. Any non-organic intelligence is going to be highly divergent in its trajectory.
There is a backup launch pad. Presumably if you blow up two launch pads you will probably decide to scrub the rest of the launches until you've solved the issue.
Source code links:
Rowan's Battle of Britain (flight sim): https://github.com/gondur/BOB_Src
Rowan's Mig Alley (flight sim): https://github.com/gondur/mig_src
Free Falcon (flight sim): https://github.com/FreeFalcon/freefalcon-central
flightgear (flight sim): https://www.flightgear.org/download/source-code/
speed dreams (sim racing): https://sourceforge.net/projects/speed-dreams/files/
There's no "objectively" here. It's all feels.

Objectively, this test successfully demonstrated the water deluge system, an intact launch pad, all engines on the first and second stage igniting and staying lit, stage separation, hot staging, and a long burn nearly to orbital speeds. That's a pretty good list of ticked boxes.

They very openly stated they didn't necessarily expect it to get all the way to splashdown. You can argue that's PR, but their history has objectively been one of incremental progress (again, see Falcon 9's landing attempts) via repeat testing.

Personally, I'd consider a mission failed if a) it carries a real payload it's supposed to get somewhere and doesn't, b) it breaks due to a previously known issue, or c) it breaks sooner than the last test. I'd also consider it entirely fine to have "reach goals" in a test.

They went longer, faster, further, and more successfully than the first test. I'm happy calling that a win, and I suspect SpaceX will as well.
Did 'Starship'?
> But there is a downside to LEDs: They're much brighter than old-fashioned energy-guzzling light bulbs.

Are light bulbs actually being used in street lighting? I can't recall ever seeing that. Typically there's some gas-discharge lighting for that, and as far as I know, good old sodium-vapor lamps are pretty energy-efficient, on top of being not-terrible for astronomy.

This makes me wonder: what are LEDs replacing? And why are LEDs being installed rather than sodium-vapor lights? Is it because they are whiter? Cheaper to install? Just more hip?
> Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill.

This is a common misconception but mixes up at least three things.

1) Yes, Eagle was long, but not because of a software bug. The exact reason is unclear and there may have been multiple factors.

2) Yes, there were unexpected computer alarms but these were caused by a hardware bug that manifested because a switch was in an unexpected position. The software handled this appropriately.

Margaret Hamilton said: “To blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was.”

3) Neil Armstrong did adjust the landing point late in the descent after noticing rough terrain. He utilized semi-automatic control to do this. Essentially adjusting the target point for the autopilot. Eagle wasn’t directly flown like an aircraft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

A great video on the AGC and Apollo 11 landing: https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM?si=Ypn6Gtp16_DEkpK9
This is what they’ll do. But that’s simply not what net-metering means. Net-metering means (essentially) buying at the same price that the utility sells.
> it's not clear to me how much of that backend is still in Common Lisp

Yes, that's why "suspect" and "obscure": I thought that well-known system is already rewritten in Google's usual languages. Turns out it isn't publicly known (?), but plausible: Google isn't afraid to rewrite their software whenever they find legacy hard to maintain, I even heard of a project that got rewritten 5 times in ~10 years.
Cool analysis....
Yep, this and the capital hill stuff is what got the plug pulled. Thank God somebody finally recognized what an enormous threat this guy and his mad scientist friends are.
The Social Network Was the Most Important Movie of All Time (2018)