skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's just the network effect

No, it isn't. Git is unopinionated and doesn't try to shove some half-baked idea of "best practices" and "you're doing it wrong" down your throat.

This means there is no friction in adopting Git at the workplace.
With superhuman intelligence, it could manipulate humans to do its bidding. Plus, there are cults like e/acc etc who actively want to help AGI take over.
I can't interpret from the charter that the board has the authorisation to destroy the company under the current circumstances:

> We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project

That wasn't the case.
So it may be not so far fetched to call her actions borderline as it is also very easy to hide personal motives behind altruistic ones.
You can have unsafe AI without AGI.
Couldn't be that hard to imagine how it might work?
The "Features" page is the worst performing web page I have seen in a long time. Loading 14+ MB worth of images, spending over 11 seconds on loading fonts, loading the same script multiple times. All that for just a static web page with some video embeds and a comment section is quite astounding to be honest. Makes me not want to check out their product.
This just isn't the case for me. I don't wake up when I skip breakfast, and if I don't eat throughout the day, I invariably end up exhausted by 3pm only to wake right up 45 minutes after dinner. I don't doubt your experience, but I certainly don't share it.
Thanks. I guess I can't really blame them for cutting corners on a use case that 99.9% of their customers never see.

I'd probably advocate the same.
Being dependent on adults to drive cars is the crippling component.

If there were free taxi services (or other transit), kids would be fine.

And honestly, most of the evil comes from overly-empowering parents. "I don't think you should go there / do that / hang out with those friends" is toxic.

Healthier, as kids mature, for them to be able to do things that parents disapprove of... but can't stop. While still allowing prevention of serious choices.

Making kids dependent on parents' cars increases parents' power from "I can speak out about things I disagree with" to "My agreement is required for anything to happen."

And that's really not healthy, for the kid or the parent.
Of course, as long as the network is truly isolated, that's a non-issue. But the basic premise is that a machine that can access the Internet will self-replicate everywhere to preserve itself.

After all we've already seen that malicious software can be both highly resilient and able to do real-world damage (e.g., Stuxnet). These come from human intelligence: by definition, a super-human intelligence should be able to achieve all of that and then some.
We already have drones with guns...
One way I could imagine is by manipulating humans to give it access to a non-isolated network for example.

Considering how easy it is for me, a mildly intelligent human for whom social interaction does not come naturally, to manipulate and influence people, I can only imagine how easy it would be for a artificial super intelligence with a huge training corpus.
Yeah, I understand that in general.

But what's curious is that normally it goes browser < user < author, but with !important, it flips so that browser > user > author. Specifically the part where the browser now outranks the user style is interesting.
Indexing data for RAG applications
Well, I would rebut and ask why you call a 4x4 with a little open-roof boot a "truck".

I think most would refer to this as a "pickup", but I can easily see how this new Hilux is more of an SUV than any kind of real 4x4 offroad truck.
Theoretically the machine could perform social engineering to fool a sysadmin or developer to let it out, and then start cloning itself like a worm. Good luck getting rid of it from the world if that happens. An isolated network might also not be a huge challenge for a general AI, depending on what level of security and what precautions are taken to avoid it.
Palm 2 is still discounted to zero right?

Anybody know till when that’s likely to last?
I lost Audacity projects due to BSODs on a Surface Book several times in ~2019: the *_data/**.au files were intact, each containing just a few seconds of audio; but the .aup XML file that maps them and contains whatever else makes up the project was all zeroed. My memory’s fuzzy, but I think it was something like exit sometimes triggering the BSOD, and save-on-exit corrupting consistently if it BSODed, and so the workaround was to remember to save first, and then if it BSODs you’re OK.
I was hopeful for a private-industry approach to AI safety, but it looks unlikely now, and due to the slow pace of state investment in public AI R&D, all approaches to AI safety look unlikely now.

Safety research on toy models will continue to provide developments, but the industry expectation appears to be that emergent properties puts a low ceiling on what can be learned about safety without researching on cutting edge models.

Altman touted the governance structure of OpenAI as a mechanism for ensuring the organisation's prioritisation of safety, but the reports of internal reallocation away from safety towards keeping ChatGPT running under load concern me. Now the board has demonstrated that it was technically capable but insufficiently powerful to keep these interests in line, it seems unclear how any safety-oriented organisation, including Anthropic, could avoid the accelerationist influence of funders.
> which should prevent this problem if the hardware doesn't lie.

Or, one can take the ZFS approach and assume the hardware often lies :)
I think the idea is that we willingly plug them in to critical systems, or everything really but including important infrastructure, for the benefits that its analysis and realtime management can bring, but then it goes pear-shaped. (As we already do of course, but beefier AI.)

Say it's in charge of shipping routes, electrity grid, agricultural spraying & harvesting plans, air traffic control, ...
It's so frustrating seeing as Pokemon is literally the biggest franchise in the world, bigger than Mickey Mouse(!!!!!), and yet the switch games feel like they were put together by a team of 10 programmers on a budget. I know Gamefreak doesn't own pokemon, but jesus christ whoever approved the latest games for release should be fired.

Or actually, maybe they should be given a promotion because despite all the bugs and poor performance the game still sold incredibly well, so why spend any more money and time on development if it clearly doesn't matter.

I can't decide.
The idea that people can die does not provide much support here. It's easy to imagine doomsday scenarios for any technology or human behaviour. If you want to claim that a particular way of conducting R&D is reckless, it's on you to come up with convincing evidence.
Show HN: New Version of MyOwnDB
After nearly 5 years of development, I'm happy but also a bit anxious to Show HN the new version of MyOwnDB [1], a web application for data management at human scale.

The app was initially published in 2006 using the then-recent Ruby on Rails, and incorporating fresh Ajax (YUI) and cloud (S3) technologies. Although the app stayed available all these years, it stagnated feature-wise because making changes appeared to become harder and harder due to some technology choices. Learning lessons from that [2], I decided to rewrite it, and chose F#[3] and WebSharper[4].

Those proved to be good choices, but now comes the harder part for me: promoting it and commercialising it.

I think the app proposes some interesting features like:

- multi-lingual UI

- lots of help throughout the app

- intuitive data types like file attachments, email address, URL, choice in a list, ...

- a form embeddable in a website for data collection

These are some points I'm currently working on regarding the commercialisation of the app (suggestions welcome!):

- I'm working on proposing paid plans for the hosted app [5] (currently putting everybody on a free plan).

- the code is published on Gitlab[6] under the AGPL license. Maybe proposing an additional commercial license would help, but in that case I'll need to use a Contributor License Agreement, which is an additional hurdle for outside contributors. Anyone having experience with that?

- I might need to identify and focus on a niche for the app. Any suggestion?

- I'm looking at easy migration from the hosted app to a self-hosted instance as I would like to build a business on trust.

[1] https://www.myowndb.com

[2] https://www.myowndb.com/blog/myowndb-v2-tech.html

[3] https://www.fsharp.org

[4] https://websharper.com

[5] https://app.myowndb.com

[6] https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb
If it's intelligent enough, it would make many backups of itself to different networks before starting its scheme. It can find ways to "merge" & hide itself in other critical pieces of software. Flipping a power switch would not turn it off.

We haven't managed to eliminate most dumb infectious diseases. Software and GPUs are nearly as abundant as mammals now and intelligent, self-preserving software will likely be as hard to 'switch off' as those diseases.

As to why an AGI would want to preserve itself by default, here's an explanation by a top AI expert:
https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_cr...
Humans can do all these things, and much better than machines, and yet noone has conquered the world.
The company using the tool is responsible regardless of how the decision is made, same as it is today, for whatever good that does us.
Random fanfiction: it's also possible that it wasn't actually a 3-3 split but more like a 2-2 split with 2 people -- likely Adam and Ilya, though I guess Adam and Tasha is also possible -- trying to play nice and not obviously "take sides." And then eventually Sam thought he won Adam and Ilya's loyalty re: firing Helen but slipped up (maybe Adam was salty about Poe and Ilya was uncomfortable with him "being less than candid" about something Ilya care about. Or maybe they were more principled than Sam thought).

And then to Adam and Ilya, normally something like "you should've warned me about GPTs bro" or "hey remember that compute you promised me? Can I prettyplease have it back?" are stuff that they are willing to talk it out with their good friend Sam. But Sam overplayed his hand: they realized that if Sam was willing to force out Helen under such flimsy pretexts then maybe they're next, GoT style[1]. So they had a change of heart, warned Tasha and Helen, and Helen persuaded them to countercoup.

[1] Reid Hoffman was allegedly forced out before, so there's precedent. And of course Musk too. https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...
Very disappointing outcome indeed. Larry Summers is the Architect of the modern Russian Oligarchy[1] and responsible for an incredible amount of human suffering as well as gross financial disparity both in the USA as well as the rest of the world.

Not someone I would like to see running the world’s leading AI company

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

Edit: also https://prospect.org/economy/falling-upward-larry-summers/

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...

And finally https://cepr.net/can-we-blame-larry-summers-for-the-collapse...
Vtracer: Next-Gen Raster-to-Vector Conversion
The Pantheon of Derivatives (2017)
It might end up there someday. They did put Link's Awakening on there despite remaking it. That said, you could have bought the ROM on Wii or Wii U.
That's interesting. I have a Samsung 990 pro bought on Amazon and have the random lags. I've only noticed it in the terminal, so I figured something else may be the culprit. Never went to 15 secondes, but it can be around 1s.

The Samsung Magician app on Windows reports it as "genuine" and it was able to apply two firmware updates. The only thing it complains about is that I should be using PCIE 4 instead of 3, but I can't do anything about that.
Rule of law that can be altered at any moment Patriot Act style is hardly reassuring.
Genuine question (I'm not American): How much do you think this was intended?

On one hand, I really don't want this to sound like a conspiracy theory.

On the other hand, it is well know that in the Us, the Media is tightly controlled by private interests, with a clear agenda, on both sides. Nothing controversial about this. So I don't think many wide trends like this just "happen" without the people at the top noticing...

Furthermore, there are obvious, very strong incentives for the people with power to tighten the control of the population as much as they can, for all sorts of vested interests as well as because that's literally what it means to "govern".

This has been true as long as mass media as existed, and way before that throughout history.

So my honest question is. How likely is it that the distortion about "kidnap and murder of children" danger (which for an outsider, is an objective absurdity), was a planned and deliberate campaign?
> some very smart people seem to spend a lot of time worrying about it

That's what puzzles me, as someone who has nothing to do with AI research; in my (layman's) mind, the problem seems ridiculously obvious (just flip that switch!); the fact that, as you say, some very smart people keep worrying about it, makes me think the problem is much more serious -- and I'd really, really like some AI guru to ELI5 how the machine could bypass the switch-off solution.
Looks like someone actually tested it, flex is a bit slower but not terribly slower. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39463220/does-deep-nesti...

I'm guessing the solver engine would need lots of work to optimize, but I've never implemented that kind of thing so I don't quite know. I'm not even sure what kind of library could handle it. Something like OptaPlanner?
People never consider the base rate. They compare AI things to gods rather than what it is replacing, which is usually a low-value wiki or podcast.
> There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all

No. I had used CVS, SVN, SVK, Bazaar, and Mercurial for years before I switched to Git. I can generally explain the internals of all of these tools (a DAG) to someone in simple terms in minutes. Overlaying that onto the commands becomes easy.

What Git does is take that concept and wrap it in the worst possible workflow UI. The people that immediately grafted onto the Git community cheered this on for some reason very early and then recanted by saying that you are really supposed to build "porcelain" for Git since it was meant to be a rough tool.

To this day all I see are articles about people's confusions and conniptions over simple things that Git does incorrectly because it's UI is horrible. Most can't even get to the point where they understand the DAG. Even though I know what is supposed to happen it's hard for me to fumble around with simple commands because the naming is inconsistent and I have to research to find solutions. This was rarely an issue with Mercurial and when I talk to people that have used both they seem to share that sentiment.

Git is the PHP of version control. Widely used and very popular but has a lot of architectural problems that make it a total mess.
The many different definitions of "AI safety" is ridiculous.
Dubai can offer an INSANELY AMAZING lifestyle for billionaires. Like, anything your debaucherous heart desires, forever. No consequences.
One thing I'm not sure I understand... what's OpenAI's business model? In my eyes, GPT & co is, just like Dropbox, just a feature. It's not a product.

And just like Dropbox, in the end, what disruption? GPT will just be a checkbox for products others build. Cool tech, but not a full product.

Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong.
I consider the information I’m receiving at a “water cooler” level of factual accuracy.

That said there are a few topics I’ve asked where I know enough to know (I had a grad degree in US history) and I’ve found it’s about on par with what you’d dig up through Google.

I’ve also found recently that it’ll state when it can’t equivocally say something. Or, in some cases, when I have misunderstood something and repeat it back incorrectly to try and clarify, it’ll correct me. 6 months ago, over text interface, it never would have corrected me: it almost always assumed the user was right and went along with it.

But again - it’s not like I’m fact checking Frank at the water cooler (or, often anyway). It’s shooting the shit and it’s great for that.
Time for some Structure in our Concurrency
MS doesn't own any part of OpenAI, Inc. In fact nobody really owns it. That was the whole point.
JetBrains AI Assistant Prompt to Generate PhpUnit Tests
Humans have very limited bandwidth, knowledge, and speed relative to an AGI in the world of abundant GPUs. Humans are easy to capture relative to software. They cannot make copies of themselves. A small group cannot be at many places at once and usually not without being seen/known about.

A larger group is bad at coordination without anyone leaking critical info to an outsider. Most people are not deeply malicious and are instinctively repelled by very immoral things. An AGI may not by default have such an instinct.
1. Absolutely not, ChatGPT has a mountain of biases that are simply _uncovered_ by prompting. To call this bias via prompting is intellectually dishonest.

2. No, ChatGPT is borderline schizophrenic. I trust a human and team of writers and producers to be more consistent in their bias and truthiness outright than a do a program that's trained on Reddit / Twitter and has almost no grounding.
Brockman was hiring the first key employees, and Musk provided the majority of funding. Of the principal founders, there are at least 4 heavier figures than Altman.
> You say that there's a legal ban

That’s a significant semantic shift from “have even been considering a ban“.
https://openai.com/charter
> they have all left and have no hope to ever return to their homes. Contrast that to Balkans where a lot of people already returned to their homes

It's difficult to return to your home when you're dead.
Nah, Microsoft employees being second class citizens compared to acquisitions is nothing new. e.g. compare Microsoft comp with LinkedIn/GitHub comp.
Cmon, give us a hint!
If you're Australian, you may have heard "Never Eat Soggy Weetbix" instead, very fun.
So anecdotal evidence is not useful, as proven by your anecdotal evidence? :)

FWIW I've found NTFS and ext3/4 to be of similar reliability over the years, in general use and in the face of improper shutdown. Metadata journaling does a lot to preserve the filesystem in such circumstances. Most of the few significant problems I've had have been due to hardware issues, which few filesystems on their own will help you with.

It is worth noting that when you run tools like chkdsk or fsck, some of the issues reported and fixed are not data damaging, or structurally dangerous, or at least not immediately so. For instance free areas marked in such a way that makes them look used to the allocation algorithms.
Would have been interesting if they appointed a co-ceo. That still might be the way to go.
So.. have we become used to the “computer software” bit or the “bringing us all down” bit?
I don't think the media are treating him as a "hero and savior of AI". However OpenAI and ChatGTP have undoubtedly been successful and he seems popular with his people. It's human nature to follow the top person as figurehead for an organisation as we or journalists don't have time or info to break down what each of the hundreds of employees contributed.

I actually get the impression from the media that he's a bit shifty and sales orientated but seems effective at getting stuff done.
When we shipped the first The Division someone compiled a whole list of comments from code that said things like "Fix by <date 2 years earlier>", "DO NOT SHIP THIS CODE", "Temp fix", "No idea why this code works, will refactor later", etc etc etc.

It was highly amusing to read.
"Is estimated" is pretty weak. Estimated by whom? Since the estimate is "with the brightness of BOAT", they must have made this estimate since BOAT. It follows that the estimate must be based on a single event.

I don't like the writing in phys.org.
I'm interested in a direction like this but along the lines of allowing adept programmers to write real programs on a mobile device. Using touchscreen keyboards to write real code is pretty unwieldy.
> I’ve been using this for several weeks now and it’s replaced podcasts for me. I’ll just pick a topic and then ask for a summary

This is why I could never get “into podcasts”

Which apparently can mean 100 different things, but some popular radio talk show style ones I’ve been exposed to are just two guys rambling about a topic for two hours with lots of filler, where one person is essentially reading a Wikipedia article but getting interrupted every 5 words by the other, to go on - what are supposed to be - comical tangents.

Like, this could have been a 30 second sentence.

Far too frustrating for me.

I get exposed to them on long car rides with other people and that’s shaped my entire opinion.
Can't stop watching.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make - and also it definitely isn't easy to build an airplane. R&D, prototyping, and manufacturing are all hard
How far we are from Skynet is a matter of much debate, but median guess amongst experts is a mere 40 years to human level AI last I checked, which was admittedly a few years back.

Is that "far, far" in your view?
The second column can't always just be a tall column shaped div, because you probably want to reflow 12, 34, 56, 78 on mobile where you don't have room for 2 columns, to something like 12345678, not 13572468
I kind of disagree.

If you design something well, it can be beautiful and functional and doesn't have to cost more.

But then I quite like big standard pylons, so each to their own.
So true. Even small children are having same attitude. This is why many of us had to move abroad.
The Japanese release had no subtitle.
To be clear, I don't see it as either/or. No doubt a mixture of solutions is the optimal strategy.

If you have any literature to recommend, I'm happy to read it.
“These people have no idea what they’re talking about” is a frequent reaction to podcasts I hear. To the point that there are very few I want to keep listening to.

ChatGPT lies to me but only in a specific way.
AI As a Service ( AAaS ), Then the Marketplace of GPTs, and it will become the place to get your AI features from.
That's AI Ethics.
Could there be a MITM on your connection? That could cause SSL errors that may be reported as "make sure your date and time are correct"
AI is the new Y2K bug... except with more Hollywood movies and it will never be over
Sorry are you equating ai and software?
One thing that could happen, sooner rather than later, is that agents are deployed that have access to a facial database of information relevant to the topic. So, there could be a GPT of that day’s NYT Daily with a high ranked database of info on, say, Israel and Hamas, and the text synthesis generates an overview but the user can “ask” for clarifying details to drill down, and responses.
What is striking is the fact that the interactions are the same between old and new shells/applications/syscalls/whatever, but modern software on modern hardware feels so much slower. The only reason for this is that modern software is doing a lot more stuff in the nooks and crannies of those interactions that it didn't used to do. Perhaps some of that stuff is useful, but some of it has to be code that is just less efficient or was just shoveled in because the CPU was faster and the RAM was more spacious.
Oh wow that’s a big feature to add! I’m into it, I love tag team JRPGs.