skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I used a dual boot configuration back in the day and found the Windows experience a lot more efficient than the Linux desktop then.

That was often due to driver support, some hardware not performing as quickly (or sometimes not being as stable) under generic OSS drivers compared to their behaviour with the manufacturer's proprietary binaries (which were quite likely not available for Linux at all). It could be very hit-and-miss, with two otherwise very similar machines performing quite differently due to one controller on the motherboard. Sometimes it was due to the generic driver not knowing for sure that a given device supported faster modes well so erring on the side of caution, a not uncommon example being a drive/controller combination ending up running in PIO mode or an old DMA mode despite supporting something much faster, in which case you could get the performance back with a little “magic” configuration manually telling it to use that better mode.

Generic drives in Windows often had the same problems, but manufacturers tended to make device-specific drivers readily available (usually in the box) for those OSs.

Other times it came down to differing defaults for things like cache modes (write-through or write back, etc), power-saving options, and so forth, which again could be tweaked with config (though the discoverability of these config options was typically not very high).
Satya and Sam committed securities fraud with their late Sunday “funding secured” ploy to protect the MSFT stock price. This was the obvious outcome. Sam had no intentions of actually going through with that and Satya was in no position to unilaterally commit to the type of funding that he was implying.

They lied to protect the stock. That should be illegal. In fact, it is illegal.
Just eat some pork rinds/chicarones. Cheap and delicious fat collagen rich bites. They get a bad rap but are quite healthy if mimimally processed.
> Apple has no by-laws committing itself to being an apple.

Does OpenAI have by-laws committing itself to being "open" (as in open source or at least their products freely and universally available)? I thought their goals were the complete opposite of that?

Unfortunately, in reality Facebook/Meta seems to be more open than "Open"AI.
This is my take too, and I'm sure in the shadows their plan is to close off the APIs as much as possible and try use it for their own gain, not dissimilar to how Google deploy AI.

There is no way MS is going to let something like ChatGPT-5 build better software products than what they have for sale.

This is an assassination and I think Ilya and Co know it.
In this case the fate of OpenAI was in fact heavily controlled by its employees. They voted with their employment. Microsoft gave them an assured optional destination.
I get the scenario where people use "AI" for their purposes. That is of course a very real scenario. But the question I raises was in relation to the OP's point about "AI" taking over the World and exterminating humans.
That's incredibly unlikely to happen [today] given how large cutting-edge AI tends to be [today] and how scarce GPUs are [today].
3D Maze is there, I'm happy.
On pinning and isolating CPU cores
There are a lot more well known easter eggs in games of that era, especially in games by id software where staff would put each other's pics in hidden places in the game.

Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.

But that's still alive in indie games today. Check out the games developed by "New Blood Interactive" for example Dusk, it's full of throwbacks and memes to classic games from the '90's. You can find them on Steam or at https://waste.money/
what is the prompt?
> Somehow they get away with showing the streets being always empty

Does anyone show vehicles in a lot of traffic in their advertising?
I'm not sure this is a correct characterization. Lex Fridman interviewed Elon Musk recently where Musk says that the "open" was supposed to stand for "open source".

To be fair, Fridman grilled Musk on his views today, also in the context of xAI, and he was less clear cut there, talking about the problem that there's actually very little source code, it's mostly about the data.
That's an interesting reframing, but the adult is scary because he's physically present, in a larger and stronger body, one with hands. A fairer comparison would be an adult messaging a child over the internet. A lot of evil can be done, but their life is unlikely to be endangered - much less so, at least, than it would be if the adult were in the driveway with a Free Candy van.
They had congressman Will Hurd on the board before. Govt-adjacent people on non-profits are common for many reasons - understanding regulatory requirements, access to people, but also actual "good" reasons like the fact that many people who work close to the state genuinely have good intentions on social good (whether you agree with their interpretation of it or not)
Not unless we believe that OpenAI is somehow "special" and unique and the only company that is capable of building AGI(or whatever).
I agree that we should usually assume good faith. Still, if a member knows she will loose the board seat soon and makes such a implicit statement to the leadership team there is reason to believe that she doesn't want both companies to be successful, at least one of those not.
There are zero podcasts from “the best person in the world”, the very concept is absurd.

No one person is particularly worth listening to individually, and as a podcast??? Good lord no.

LLMs beat podcasts when it comes to, “random exploration of an unfamiliar topic”, every single time.

The real issue here is that you trust podcasts so completely, by the way, not that ChatGPT is some oracle of knowledge. More generally, a skill all people need to develop is the ability to explore an idea without accepting whatever you first find. If you’re spending an afternoon talking with ChatGPT about a topic, you should be able to A) use your existing knowledge to give a rough first-pass validation of the information you’re getting, which will catch most hallucinations out of the gate, as they’re rarely subtle, and B) take what you learn with a hefty grain of salt, as if you’re hearing it from a stranger in a bar.

This is an important skill, and absolutely applies to both podcasts and LLMs. Honestly why such profound deference to podcasts in particular?
I don't think this is actionable in anyway, even if what you say was shown unequivocally to be true.
As someone who grew up in South Africa, I envied the freedom American kids seemed to have. Crime is extremely high here and safety was always a huge concern in our high-walled suburbs.
The cryptocurrency industry faces another major setback as Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder and CEO of Binance, has stepped down and pleaded guilty to breaking US anti-money laundering laws. Further, CZ agreed to the $4.3 billion settlement, which is one of the largest corporate penalties in US history, including a personal payment of $50 million by Zhao. This comes exactly a year after the collapse of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.
I find it interesting that for all the talk from OpenAI staff that it was all about the people, and from Satya that MS has all the rights and knowledge and can jumpstart their own branch at the turn of a dime, it seems getting control of OpenAI proper was a huge priority.

Given that Claude sucks so bad, and this week’s events, I’m guessing that the ChatGPT secret sauce is not as replicable as some might suggest.
The whole of the discussion is largely done along (now forgotten) cultural pathways first walked by Christian religion, so AGI has taken on capabilities and motivations that make it basically the devil. Thus by definition it can do whatever is needed to bring about the catastrophe that is its destiny.
"Positive impact" for me would be things like improve social injustice, reduce poverty, reduce CO2 emissions, etc. Not saying that it's a negative impact to make programmers more productive, but it's not like ChatGPT is saving the world.
Works for me :) I have per-dataset encryption and seems to work just fine.
See Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, for a discussion in depth. It's a property of all life. I think of it as a zone between inanimate and immolated. We need energy flow to live, but too much kills.
I disagree. These linguistic innovations (including "like") serve to soften the message. It signals to the listener that the information is not based on considered truth, but on impressions, vibes. This is genuinely how its used, to signal the difference between a personal opinion and something somebody is convinced of. It's kind of like adding "but I could be wrong" to the end of everything
We'll never know. But git being used to manage the Linux Kernel did a lot for its asendency. if Mercurial had been the choice, maybe we'd all be on Hghub instead of Github. Bitkeeper's proprietary status is what dampened enthusiasm there.
These board members failed miserably in their intent.

Also, they will find a hard time joining any other board from now on.

They should have backed up the claims in the letter. They didn’t.

This means they didn’t have how to backup their claims. They didn’t think it through… extremely amateurish behavior.
> Git is very good with large repos

Not really. It only very recently got support for partial clones, sparse checkouts (still experimental!) `git status` daemon (only on Windows and Mac!), etc. And that's only because Microsoft is pushing it.

> My guess is that people adopt monorepos because they aspire to be Google-scale, but it usually doesn't make sense for their workflow.

Rubbish, it's nothing to do with wanting to be Google-scale. In fact being Google-scale makes a monorepo more difficult and require custom tooling.

The reason people like monorepos is because they don't have the downsides of multirepos:

* Cross-repo changes are very difficult to do and even harder to test.

* Testing code becomes very difficult. For example if you update a library that's in one repo, how do you test all the things that depend on it? Very difficult with multirepos, trivial with monorepos.

* Git's support for submodules is really bad.

The downside of monorepos is that they are big and slow, but they work fine as long as you aren't Google scale.
> Social media in the early 00s seemed pretty harmless -- you're effectively merging instant messaging with a social network/public profiles however it did great harm to privacy, abused as a tool to influence the public and policy, promoting narcissism etc. AI is an order of magnitude more dangerous than social media.

The invention of the printing press lead to loads of violence in Europe. Does that mean that we shouldn't have done it?
Pickup trucks are pretty much a rounding error over in Europe. Considering that the Hilux is marketed as the bastard child of an offroad vehicle and passenger car, calling it an SUV isn't too much of a stretch.
That's what PLP is for.
Who is Gollum in this cut?
my git reset --hard disagrees
I find that tedious. Mainly because it's really easy to switch between chrome and firefox via keyboard, but to switch between profiles/containers requires mouse clicks etc.
Alright, it might be that the memory fades and that it was OGG that I were struggling with, nevertheless the music playback worked way better in Linux. My issue I had were modelines/vertical refresh rate and having the graphics card recognized as it were my first computer and as a newbie with no friends to ask it felt rather steep to understand XFree86.

But it was the IBM Aptiva K23 (basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY ) with 12MB onboard. Later upgraded to the K6-2 (500?) with a real speed bump.
I'm pretty sure that in the podcasts I listen to, no one is shamelessly making something up completely.
The widescreen setting in the menu adjusts 3d rendering (and not even in the best way imaginable), a lot of other things are unaffected by it.
Basically this, and it’s a bigger deal than it may sound. Competent technical management is a scarce commodity worth its weight in gold around NASA Goddard. A lot of (both frontline and upper) management has no technical background and it shows.

JWST was a shambles when I interned there in 2014. Eternally delayed and broken due to nonsensical decisions by management with absolutely zero engineering knowledge. Sometime in the 90s they had decided to save money on devs by “auto-generating” the code from UML diagrams using this thing called Rational Rose. In the mid-2010s they were still trying to fix the code. I never quite figured out if it was an urban legend, but there was also a story around Goddard that when JSWT did its acoustic testing (to simulate launch conditions), a bunch of screws fell off—and when they put them back, they were left with several extra screws that nobody ever figured out the place for. So that’s the state the program was in.

Greg Robinson seems to be an engineering manager who’s actually highly competent at both the engineering and the management, and that’s exactly what the program needed to turn around. Honestly, when I was there I thought there was very little chance this thing would actually work, if it ever launched at all, so major props to him and the team.

I saw this in way more programs than just JWST. Word would get around among us contractors that X program had real technical management and Y didn’t, and we’d all try to get onto X. If you got stuck on Y, you’d spend most of your time doing paperwork and PowerPoint instead of coding.

It happened in the civil service too. Most of the branches in the software division had non-technical leadership and seemed to do little of note, but the few with technical leaders did incredible work. I remember one time a previously-good branch had its head depart (promoted?) and the new head wasn’t technical at all, and over a few months most of the good civil servants transferred somewhere else. At one point it seemed like most of the progress in the software division was being driven by one rather obscure-sounding branch, simply because that was the one with sound technical leadership and thus all the good engineers.
> All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties?

Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?

Because you are clearly rationalizing involving a larger military power whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors. Thus, bringing ever more people into the cycle of hatered.

Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"

Obviously, they won't.
Not sure if you're asking a serious question about MSF but it's interesting anyways - when these types of orgs are fundraising for a specific campaign, say Darfur, then they can NOT use that money for any other campaign, say for ex Turkey earthquake.

That's why they'll sometimes tell you to stop donating. That's here in EU at least (source is a relative who volunteers for such an org).
It’s not like they have any control over this. What should they do ? Yeah they could say fuck-off to Universal & Co but it would be their instant death.

Right holders made them sign extremely strict contracts which disallow Spotify to diversify themselves. Notoriously, their contracts with majors states that they are forbidden to develop their own in-house label.
>Furthermore, the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either.

The OpenAI employees overwhelmingly rejected the groupthink of the Effective Altruism cult.
But “Sam Altman, Microsoft PM” would have been a much funnier outcome
Exactly, society's Prefects rarely have the technical chops to do any of these things so they worm their way up the ranks of influence by networking. Once they're in position they can control by spreading fear and doing the things "for your own good"
Yes, there it sounds just perfect. The best TTS I've ever heard.
> life's administrative tasks.

Life's administrative tasks got way worse with computwrisation. Now I have to book my own flight, make sure they match with hotels, take my own reading from electric, water and gas meters, register everywhere myself and endlessly prove my indetity to hindreds of institutions.

I have an email mailbox for changes in terms and conditions that get sent to me, it is about 800 emails. If I hired a lawyer to go through them, it would probably cost $100,000
It's what people said about Google!

We went from debating a topic to Googling the answer and resolving a whole night's debate in seconds.

And I will tell you that Google didn't always get it right. Often a tweak to the search term could get the wrong answer, but win the argument.

There are three topics banned at my table.
Religion, politics, AI, Sam Altman, punctuation and maths.
Over the last 10 years of industry work, I'd say about 20% of my time has been format shifting, or parsing half baked undocumented formats that change when I'm not paying attention.

That pretty much matches my experience working with NN's and LLM's
What happened over the weekend is a death and rebirth, of the board and the leaderships structure which will definitely ripple throughout the company in the coming days. It just doesn't align perfectly with how you want it to happen.
If having an apple logo makes a company an apple, then Apple is in fact an apple
When you look at some standard AI textbook, such as Russel/Norvig, you see that there is not much about being called „AI“. The simplest „intelligent agents“ are functions with an „if“ statement. The smallest Node.js application has more complexity.
Try asking it about the Roman empire (e.g. “who was Nero?”) then checking the answer.

It’s very good at things like that. Go down a whole Roman Empire rabbit hole, have fun with it!

This is what an idle afternoon talking to ChatGPT is about, not trying to get it to do your job for you.
>>This means there is no friction in adopting Git at the workplace.
It could be said that the virality (network effect) is higher as it spreads easier. Anything is opinionated it's just whether or not those opinions align with your internal values. It appears git aligns with you.
What you just wrote makes more sense applied to LLM output than podcasts! You'd just as easily argue that "radio" or "news" is all bad if you don't want to differentiate between different forms of expression and communication within a medium. (Which, obviously, would be silly)
Great books, courses, and music for the holidays (2023)
Some of the favorites of Bill Gates this year.

What were the books and courses that are your favorites this year?
big bacteria, obviously...
A blog isn't enough for this kinda stuff, I've love to read the book on the entire early days of what became Rockstar North.
That burns bridges with people in OpenAI

People underestimate the effects of social pressure, and losing social connections. Ilya voted for Sam's firing, but was quickly socially isolated as a result

That's not to say people didn't genuinely feel committed to Sam or his leadership. Just that they also took into account that the community is relatively small and people remember you and your actions
https://youtu.be/ZeecOKBus3Q

Basically, any sufficiently advanced agent will have “prevent anyone from switching me off” as an instrumental goal. And any sufficiently advanced intelligence will come up with ways of achieving its goals that lesser intelligences can’t predict. Taking steps to prevent itself from being turned off could be its first order of business, not necessarily only as the human is about to hit the off switch.

While we can’t predict what a greater intelligence would come up with, the obvious thing is social engineering. Remember that one of the factors that lead to the Jan 6th attack on the capital was that a random text generating agent named “Q” (we know it was a human because it was before generative AI was any good) convinced thousands of people that Democrats are running a child sex cult. I doubt whoever was behind it expected it to be that successful, but a greater intelligence possibly could have predicted the outcome, and made it even more successful. We don’t know the extent to which we can be manipulated because it’s only ever been human intelligences doing the manipulating.
Not only was it left in the code, it was even changed to allow multiple size levels. gta 3 only has a toggle, two sizes.
> I've noticed a common thread with people who complain about counterfeits is that they're literally buying alphabet soup brand fakes from chinese FBA sellers instead of buying products directly sold by amazon

AMEN to that !

And the most annoying thing is that those of us who know to avoid FBA is that Amazon have removed the "sold by Amazon" search filter tick-box.

So whilst in the past you could tick a box and be presented with a list of products which are direct-sold rather than FBA, you cannot do that anymore.

According to some Reddit posts, you can still do it if you hack the URL and add an "emi=$obscure_value" GET-param. But I'm guessing sooner or later Amazon will kill this work-around too.
Agreed, take Hacker News for example. 99% of the articles are in a domain I don't have years of professional experience.

However, when that one article does come up, and I know the details inside/out , the comments sections are rife with bad assumptions, naïve comments and misinformation.
D'Angelo wasn't even removed from this board; this is simply not how failing works at this level.
Clearly the board members did not think through even the immediate consequences. Kenobi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVBX7l2zgRw
"higher values" like trying to stop computers from saying the n-word?
What do you mean? It would be conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud, the SEC can totally act on that if they want to.
Well, if they can ship 10K of these, even in expensive halo cars, it'll quickly establish itself whether these are game changers or not. I imagine volume production, by Toyota or a licensee, ramping up quickly if they really work as advertised.
I wish I could give a good explanation, but from what I understand it's more down to fluid dynamics than usual intuition would dictate.

The resistance curve [0] has unusual peaks where resistance is highest based on wave creation and interaction with the hull length [1], which interestingly makes longer ships able to reach higher cruise speeds more efficiently (why container ships are as large as they can be), but it also increases these maximums that need to be passed, making transitioning to planing even harder. Due to these factors you'd probably need beyond 8x the engine power to plane/foil with a 2x larger ship.

[0] https://amarineblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/basics-ofshi...

[1] https://calconcalculator.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/imag...
CSS Background Patterns
I did not know this. Thanks for the little lesson in grammar!
I think they'd only be able to improve the SNR if they know how to separate fact from fiction. While I would love to believe they can do that in 1-2 years, I don't see any happy path for that.
That's true of more than just software
> Came from a time when games were a product of passion of a few, and not of a soulless corporation.

Only committee-approved and/or mandated easter eggs permitted. Don't forget to catalogue them all so the social media team have more content.
The thing we should all take from this is that unions work :)