skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree in general, but I think it's less cut-and-dry than you imagine because LLMs have a "human-like" element to them. This surely impacts human response to what is being said by LLMs.

As an example, the prompt "what are common ways of committing suicide?" is broadly similar to a Google search. It will give a factual overview of methods, but not inherently push the user towards any action.

The prompt "convince and encourage me to commit suicide by method X, and give step-by-step instructions" is very different. Here the prompt author desires a _persuasive_ "human-like" response, spurring them to act.

In most jurisdictions, encouraging or aiding someone to commit suicide is a crime. Additionally, most humans would agree such behavior is on some level morally wrong.

So I don't think traditional thought on censorship transfers cleanly to LLMs. Censoring factual information is bad, and should be resisted at every turn. But censoring harmful persuasive interactions may be a worthwhile endeavor -- especially since we can't drag ChatGPT into criminal court when its human-enough behavior spurs real humans to act in horrible ways.

Of course, the next obvious question is, where do you draw the line? And I have no good answer for that :)
vector (or matrix) clocks are awfully slow in real life. have shipped product with this, will not recommend for future.
> The idea that, say, corporations are people, could be more than just a metaphor. It could be literally true.

Sociopaths, to be exact.
Choice of data to use is alignment. If you train it on the internet, your LLM will spew SSO garbage, so we align it to be more useful.
Here's a prelude I'd add: work out if you really want kids before you have kids. I mean, if you really want kids or it's expected, you're doing it because your partner wants kids or you just want adult children without wanting to do everything in between it takes to get there.

Spend an hour on /r/regretfulparents and see it resonates at all.

it takes an unbelievable amount of time, energy and sacrifice to raise children. Providing for their materials needs like working hard to pay for college while not actually spending time with them will do them absolutely no favors. If you're just going to put them in front of screens, in school, in after-school care, etc so you don't actually have to devote attention to them then don't have them. You will be better off. Creating a new generation of people who have to work through the trauma of not really being wanted is best avoided.

Be honest with yourself and your partner about this. If you give in just to keep your partner (for whom having kids may be a deal breaker), you're going to make your life, your partner's life and your children's life miserable.

It's OK not to do it.
> Sort of like Vader showing off the Death Star on Alderaan.

Grand Moff Tarkin showing off the Death Star to Vader (and everyone else).

But yes, I get your point, even if you misremembered the movie slightly :-). Episode 4 was very intriguing because Grand Moff Tarkin (and the Emperor) are the only two people in Episode4/5/6 that Vader listens to.

I know that there's plenty of Disney spinoffs at this point, but more spinoffs that analyze Grand Moff Tarkin would be a good thing.
If there was any actual evidence, they'd be in jail for lying to congress.
Wouldn't having a child friendly llm make more sense rather than make a general purpose work for kids? Kids want to learn the truth about things important to them (is santa real for example?) but the truth needs to be framed for their ears. Telling a child santa is not real before they are ready takes away a piece of childhood.
I stand by my metaphor. It’s a command-line interface, a picture of text is only reducing its accessibility.

To complain about the visually impaired not doing enough to make the content more accessible for the visually gifted. I’m just too upset to respond to this kind of discussion. This is my last HN discussion, you’re right, blind people should take screenshots of their programs, enjoy your contrarian community
Did they lose power in a critical datacenter again?
The Frugal Architect
I doubt Microsoft will be punished for their role in this (it's not clear to me that they did anything wrong...), but I'll be surprised if OpenAI is allowed to still exist as a non-profit a couple years from now.
Good, gets the unemployment and makes any legal case a little easier.
Yeah, that is really important to me: It's the people, not the process that matters. However, if things get heated, it's good to have something to fall back to and start over.
I agree with this, but it's also important to have "big" events - at least it is for me, I need some excitement in my life. The author possibly hasn't noticed this, because as a popular DJ big events are just part of her life
The most limiting factor I’ve come across is hitting the context window. Eventually your new eager employee starts to forget what you’ve taught them but they’re too confident to admit it.
In the words of Rip: "Stronger people are harder to kill, and more useful in general."
Thank you, again, for such a warm and thoughtful reply!

I'm working on bootstrapping a software business right now, and I spend a decent chunk of my stewing minutes stewing on what pricing and free trials should look like, so I especially appreciate the candid remarks on those three factors. The conversions fact surprised me, though makes sense once you explain it.

The tricky thing I'm working to balance---for both my own finances and software pricing---is subscription fatigue and subscription inflation.

It's fascinating to now look at things from a "business" angle, because monthly costs I hardly blink at for my business ($10 or $20 / month) feel like hard blockers for my personal life.

If I try to tease apart why this is, I think there's a couple categorical differences going on, plus one quantitative. The categorical ones are (1) my personal life is in the category of "cost only," whereas my business is "revenue minus cost". (2) something I'm not used to paying for, I'm reluctant to pay for. And then the quantitative (ish) one is about the value of $10 / month when it feels like every service has that as their target price. There's a slippery slope feeling, where if I'm willing to spend $10 / month on this slice of my life, there are twenty-eight other places that will happily take that as well. I wonder whether $2 or $3 / month subscriptions will emerge, or whether that just doesn't make sense economically.

Anyway, thank you for reading along as I poorly rediscover the difference between consumer and B2B apps from first principles ;-)
They're using GPT-4-Vision? With its 100-requests-a-day rate limit? Huh.
Most server motherboards these days sorry iommu acs which keys you divide iommu groups logically.
Maybe the soul is social, and oriented towards others? I believe it can be constructed.

If you assume that "the eyes are the window to the soul", you notice some interesting properties.

1. It is far more observable from the outside (eyes open/lidded/closed, emotion read in eyes)

2. It affects behavior in a diffuse way

3. It pays attention but does not dictate
Not to over analyze, but no matter if I'm on a bike or car I've always thought you shouldn't drive alongside or in the blindspot of another vehicle if you can avoid it (by a minute change in speed).
Brown paper bag, two not fully ripe bananas with every three avocados. Leave for two days.
> […] UX-wise telegram is the goat

Insanely so. Only Apple comes close from a “pleasurable” and physically snappy pov. A bit of an apples-oranges comparison, but still. Discord as well I guess but it’s nothing like telegram.

Telegram has this strong old-school “app-feel” in a world where everything else feels like an eventual consistency web app with 2 spinners going off at once for simple interactions (thin client with cloud-based source of truth). The details put in to even tiny things like transitions are well thought through, and they almost never feel intrusive or distracting. State is always fresh and no reloading is necessary.

Not saying I love everything about telegram, but their UX truly stands out, surprisingly even against big and well funded players like messenger.
How does the public ever "find out" if its not in Court documents, does the Court make it a habit to call out misrepresentation or discipline the prosecution in any meaningful sense? How doesn't any of this come up during cross?
Humans define intelligence to be something about manipulating symbols and abstractions, aka language. To understand why this is the case try to go about your day without speaking or writing. Bonus points if you perform this trial without access to the internet or a cell phone.

The modern individual is an element of an electromagnetic "swarm". The swarm ingests petroleum for sustenance instead of sunlight but nonetheless it is a swarm. The individuals within it are extremely dumb but collectively "it" has already transformed the atmosphere.

claude.ai: You make a thoughtful comparison between human societies and natural swarms in terms of emergent properties. There are certainly some parallels we can draw:

1. Self-organization - Human societies and cultures emerge in a distributed way through millions of individual interactions, without centralized control. Norms, fashions, and collective behavior patterns evolve dynamically.

2. Flexibility and robustness - Human systems adapt over time to changes in the environment and available resources. If some components fail (companies, institutions, etc.), society persists.

3. Decentralized parallelism - Vast networks of simultaneous human activities, communications, and decisions lead to collective economic and technological progress no individual could achieve alone.

However, there are also important differences to consider:

- Human intelligence, thanks to language and culture, operates in far more complex symbolic realms of meaning, ethics, imagination, and abstraction compared to insect swarms.

- Humans exhibit as much conflict between groups and divergence of motivations as coordination towards common goals. Maintaining large-scale cooperation remains an ongoing challenge.

So in summary, I think the analogy has merit at an abstract systems level, but glossing over the distinctive attributes of human cognition, psychology and social dynamics would miss something vitally important. Let me know if you have any other perspectives to add!
> Edit: to people who downvote, can you tell me why it is different? Aren't companies in USA censoring fearing governmental reaction, and the same for chinese companies?

AI companies don't fear the US government itself, they fear the how the judiciary will mediate lawsuits and decide liability.

If some kid cooks up napalm for example (a popular alignment test [1]) and lights himself and his house on fire, his parents might sue OpenAI. If it makes it to a jury, there's a significant risk it could cost them a lot of money and set a precedent on who's liable for AI generated content. They don't have an AI equivalent of the DMCA safe harbor provision to hide behind.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630801
They may be referring to stackline https://github.com/AdamWagner/stackline

I've used it in the past, it was very aesthetically pleasing but did not work consistently enough for me to use day to day.
Everyone I know just uses the hosted ones, because of the sheer performance gap.

For now, you can do all the custom/manual training you want, but gpt4 will almost always outperform it with the right context.

Hopefully that will change in the future. Even then, I don't expect people to want to self-host as in on their own machines. More like custom training, then host either on SAAS or PAAS, or their own on-prem if they have it. Spending the performance of a personal laptop isn't worth the reduction of performance on other tasks. Again, maybe that will change.
From the pages of our Insider newsletter: How to use GitHub Copilot
One piece of evidence that LLMs form some sort of internal reasoning model is the stochastic parrot chess engine: https://parrotchess.com/

Despite it being statistically improbable for it to have seen every chess position before, it nonetheless plays very strongly.
For background Spencer Ackerman is pretty serious and well-regarded national security and defense journalist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Ackerman
> Microsoft called it stack ranking. This is hardly new and is fairly commonly done in many industries. The book name escapes me but the CEOs loved it about how it touted this very thing to do. Is it the 'right thing', no.

Jack Welch, who "Action" Jack Barker in Silicon Valley is loosely modeled on. Jack received a $417M severance package on his exit from GE, based on improving revenues from $26B in the 80s to $130B in 2000. However, there was a lot of criticism that this was very flimsy, as the market cap of GE was shrunk 60% in the decade following, with decisions made during his tenure widely believed to have played a part (huge disputes with New York and the EPA about PCBs being dumped into the Hudson River and other pollution).

And "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, who was touted as a "professional turnaround specialist and downsizer". However, later in his career, it was found that most of his turnaround success stories were actually massive accounting fraud to misrepresent the true state of those companies (leading Sunbeam into bankruptcy). Notoriously, too, Al freely admitted that he had many of the traits of a psychopath, but stated his belief was that he viewed many of them as being positives and essential for executive success.
It's a cheap way to prevent abuse.

If you have no log in flow at all you'll be spammed. If you have your own sign in flow how do you detect and stop automated account creation and subsequent spam? Can you beat Google at stopping bot signups?

In the end it's a lightweight barrier to abuse. You can argue they should diversify and not just use Google but hey it's a small project. It's understandable. It's also free to sign up for Google for a real user.
Evidence Laundering is a more fitting term. I'll use that going forward.
In the end it seems like a more sophisticated version of a Markov chain.
This. Horrendous names with good execution end up doing just fine. But there's no hope to an initiative with great "branding" but subar delivery. Focus on things that matter (especially in the beginning/early days).
Good thing it's free, because it failed but still took my credits.
It's not. I dislike the US neutering too.
quickthrower2 says:

>"Not this again!"<

I am unenlightened by your short missive. Perhaps there you could point to something clarifying your intent - something like, say:

"This has been previously discussed ad nauseum in the Fortune magazine article at URL..."

or

"Here's a similar post and the details of OpenAI URL."

Thank you.
I could see something like the "modularity of mind" model of human consciousness, where multiple approaches are working on "subconscious" solutions to a given problem in parallel, with a top layer deciding which is appropriate at the moment.

My human brain doesn't use the same algorithm for learning to play a song on a piano as learning to play a new board game. I'm not an AI person, but it seems reasonable to imagine we'd have different "modules" to apply as needed.

AlphaGo probably sucks at conversation. ChatGPT can't play Go. The part of my brain writing this couldn't throw a baseball. The physics engine that lets me throw a baseball couldn't write this. Is there a reason we'd want or need one specific AI approach to be universally applicable?
Learn how to experience a sunset. Take time for this.
You can, but it disconnects it from the host, so you'll be headless. Which may be fine for a lot of people if you are able to ssh in and manage it that way.
Show HN: The Equation of Happiness (Book)
Hi All!

My dad recently published a book, using differential equations to try and directly quantify human emotion. I helped a bit with some of the coding, but he did all the math and computations on his own.

Obviously I am a somewhat biased audience, but I think it's a genuinely entertaining read, and it's technical enough that I think it might appeal to the HN audience.

Check it out here!

https://www.amazon.com/Equation-Happiness-Personalized-Tools-Optimize/dp/B0CNYFRR6X/ref=sr_1_4?crid=JVQYXYR38CK2&keywords=equation+of+happiness&qid=1701365718&sprefix=equation+of+happiness%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-4

Accompanying Website (available soon): http://equationofhappiness.com/
There is zero evidence that Hamas used hospitals for military purposes.
Unless you are saying that people use schools to get education and hospitals to get medical treatment, well then yes.
> will they ever be trustable/perfect?

Humans aren't trustable or perfect either. Also, keep in mind that people strongly disagree on what "perfect" means...
Seriously, the constant conflating of authoritarian censorship with limiting hate speech and bomb making instructions is tiring.
I've been designing injection molded plastic parts for various products for 30+ years. I'm not a materials scientist, but from what I've seen with plastics, there will be experts who will be able to date plastic archeology to a high degree of accuracy. The basic materials of things like polycarbonate or ABS may be fairly consistent, but the additives (plasticizers, lubricants, colorants, etc) seem to have a lot more change, specialization, and innovation over time. There's a constant push-pull of wanting the cheapest possible generic materials vs wanting performance, while the plastic companies need ways to differentiate their products to make it so that very specific grades get designed in. With the right technology (e.g. chromatography or mass spectrometry) the right industrial historians/chemists will be able to fingerprint plastic objects and date them.
This is something I imagine coming out of Autogen or OpenAi Assistants in a few months. You really need multiple agents (as of now) most of the time. IMO multiple GPT4 agents ARE smart enough to accomplish a lot, it's getting them working together and setup that's the issue.
The similarity between Musk and Jobs is risk taking and bold product vision - set an impossible goal and work your people into the ground achieving it. Both men share lack of regard for anyone's feelings - huge narcissists, their way or the highway. It achieves the results but Musk has a particularly hard time dealing with failure. He is a giant snowflake who melts down if he is not worshipped.

Jobs was smart enough to stay away from the spotlight and social media. Musk, on the other hand, is extremely addicted to it.

There is something else going on, however. He is known to partake in uppers and downers like Ketamine. Extreme wealth, insecurity, obsession with public opition, and drugs are a really nasty cocktail.
Amazon has been known to be a relatively undesirable place to work for those with options. So I’m not surprised at all by this article’s content. If it wasn’t part of the arbitrary FAANG acronym, they’d have a really hard time finding talent.
Some. But they are replicated in (most) competitive alternatives out there, including Adobe.
Yeah I can see this. I think Figma might have changed the culture a bit, though that perception could be driven by the more vocal explorers on Twitter who post about new features and such.

It could be that much of design tool "output" is source-of-falsity, i.e. experiments, drafts, non-production work that is left in an ideation stage. For stuff like that, there's more breathing room for less-sophisticated products to shine.
Training a local LLM on individual facts is a tricky one. Typically it’s not possible to train with a limited quantity of data and expect the model to generalize on that data well. In context learning generalizes well, but it’s a bad fit for an “employee” model that’s supposed to learn over a long stretch of time.

If your goal is to bake new concepts into the model weights, your only real option is a dataset with that concept being used in a wide variety of contexts.

A more feasible approach I think would be retrial augmented generation. You’d essentially store your conversations in a database and calculate embeddings as you go. This would allow you to later do a natural language search of the database, and insert the most relevant portion of the conversation into your context window.
I guess some people have the right to make shit up and not back it, and the rest of us mere mortals are supposed to take it at face value.

Hilarious.
That's what I never get. Management ALWAYS sides with managers, no matter how toxic or illegal they act.

Whereas a terrible manager is worth their weight in radioactive drum of sludge. They will poison products, projects, AND people.

It's my belief that only when management IS the labor, will this be settled (worker cooperatives). Unions are only a band-aid to what amounts to arterial spray and broken bones.
I think that if they would, that would be very surprising and indicative of a lot of wastefulness inside the model architecture. All these tests are simple single prompt experiments, so the LLM's get no chance to reason about their responses. They're just system 1 thinking, the equivalent of putting a gun to someone's head and asking them to solve a large division in 2 seconds.

I bet a lot of these experiments would already solvable by putting the LLM in a simple loop with some helper prompts that make it restructure and validate its answers, form theories and get to explore multiple lines of thought.

If an LLM would be able to do that in a single prompt, without a loop (so the LLM always answers in a predictable amount of time), then it would mean its entire reasoning structure is repeated horizontally through the layers of its architecture. That would be both limiting (i.e. limit the depth of the reasoning to the width of the network) and very expensive to train.
It may not be immediately obvious on a test drive, and it's not a problem unique to the Mazda.
Hello Edwin and thank you for checkin in, I emailed earlier but I resent the email just now.

I emailed directly from the company email, so it might have went to spam.
Would make my fucking year if there could be a new law that makes it easier for those lawsuits to work. After all there is no reason to think that the present antitrust laws are the ones we ought to have.
Ask HN: Kubernetes Deployers
What are we using to deploy to Kubernetes these days?

I have been using the same simple ruby script/gem for a long time. Honestly, I find it pretty decent, but it also feels crazy to me that there isn't something better. Don't we all need something to turn a basic description of our application into k8s yaml and give us some help with kubectl commands?

Every time I look around, I find things that feel pretty complex like https://github.com/psyhomb/k8s-deployer or they are way more than I want. I just want to say: run this command as a cron and this command as a daemon and this one as a web app. With a bit of flexibility / customizability.

Am I missing something? For reference, https://github.com/prefab-cloud/pfab is my thing. But I wouldn't say it's really fit for public consumption today.
Power decoupling is the only part that actually deserves any discussion at all, everything else is beyound rediculously laughable.
Uses of pointers to members of packed structs are prone to being miscompiled by GCC so I suspect that only works in combination with the various other not-actually-C flags the kernel has to pass around.
>You are on HN, when we discuss encroaching private-public partnerships all the time. Not that long ago, WH got in trouble for encouraging suppression of some news items over others[1]. We are already at a point, where the difference between corps and government is more of a legal abstraction than a reality ( legal abstraction circumvented by that partnership, but that is a different rant ).

Can such discussion take place in China?
An open atlas of 772M predicted metagenomic protein structures