skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think there are a lot of surprises on either side about what's coming next. Most of this is really about pacifying shareholders (on Google's side) who are no doubt starting to wonder if they are going to fight back at all.

With either OpenAI and Google, or even Microsoft, the mid term issue is as much going to be about usability and deeper integration than it is about model fidelity. Chat gpt 4 turbo is pretty nice but the UI/UX is clumsy. It's not really integrated into anything and you have to spoon feed it a lot of detail for it to be useful. Microsoft is promising that via office integration of course but they haven't really delivered much yet. Same with Google.

The next milestone in terms of UX for AIs is probably some kind of glorified AI secretary that is fully up to speed on your email, calendar, documents, and other online tools. Such an AI secretary can then start adding value in terms of suggesting/completing things when prompted, orchestrating meeting timeslots, replying to people on your behalf, digging through the information to answer questions, summarizing things for you, working out notes into reports, drawing your attention to things that need it, etc. I.e. all the things a good human secretary would do for you that free you up to do more urgent things. Most of that work is not super hard it just requires enough context to understand things.

This does not even require any AGIs or fancy improvements. Even with chat gpt 3.5 and a better ux, you'd probably be able to do something decent. It does require product innovation. And neither MS nor Google is very good at disruptive new products at this point. It takes them a long time and they have a certain fail of failure that is preventing them from moving quickly.
No. Most unions will support employees not crossing picket lines. Good luck getting Teamsters, who are working and collecting paychecks, to drive a truck past strikers.
Uhm, two things I just don't understand are:

1: What is programming a quantum computer like?

2: What are the useful applications of a quantum computer?

I know everyone always says encryption, which implies that a quantum computer can run calculations in parallel; specifically, significantly more orders of magnitude more parallel than a conventional, multicore / multi-CPU computer.

But beyond that?
Who knew that non-free UEFI might be a bad idea? /s
Tech report seems to hint at the fact that GPT-4 may have had some training/testing data contamination and so GPT-4 performance may be overstated.
One question I have as someone who tries to maintain (some) data sovereignty: is there any way as an end-user to circumvent/mitigate this kind of surveillance — aside from abandoning iOS and Android completely?
How do we distribute the cost? Say a popular creator uploads a video to a peertube instance and gets 10 million views, the video is 10 minutes and 15mbps bitrate, that's roughly 10 petabytes of data the peertube server needs to send.

If we take say, Vultr as an example for outgoing data costs, that's something like $100,000 of data for a single video.

Yes P2P will take some of that load off, but not that much with how restrictive NAT is these days.
How does it compare to Nvidia A100?
I would prefer relational databases just have a compound hierarchal data type that can contain all the types it supports. Json is so anemic on types.

This way it can efficiently store numbers , dates, uuids or raw binary etc. and should really have some sort of key interning to efficiently store repeating key names.

Then just have functions to convert to/from json if thats what you want
Less than a year difference is "quite far behind"?

Lotus 1-2-3 came out 4 years before Microsoft Excel. WordPerfect came out 4 years before Microsoft Word.

Hotmail launched 8 years before Gmail. Yahoo! Mail was 7 years before Gmail.

Heck, AltaVista launched 3 years before Google Search.

I don't think less than a year difference is meaningful at all in the big picture.
China has the second biggest output of AI/ML research after the US. So not that surprising.
I think people put way to much trust it political institutions, at least at the scale of national, which are, for the most part, only really used to protect a certain classes of people, the people who run it.

The problem with corruption is scale, when you have too large of an institution, it's easier to hide intent. I don't see how you can police that by voting when so much of what goes on is not easily seen.

For every persons that gets voted in to do the right thing, there are 4 others who are doing the wrong thing.
For many, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal or whatever serves as an addition to, not a substitute for a large music collection. Over the years, I've amassed some 2,200 LPs, 2,500 CDs or so, lots and lots of live recordings on cassette, CD-R or DAT tape - yet still I keep a Spotify account to keep up-to-date on what's being released, checking out artists recently being brought to my attention &c - there's no denying that the '(Almost) all the music in the world for one flat fee' is an attractive proposal when checking out new stuff.

Spotify's artist compensation is laughable, though, so whatever good stuff I find, more often than not I seek out physical media. (Much to my wife's despair...)
Quick implementation-demo on the tiny XR Fragment spec, which allows referencing/tagging all things 3D in a device/fileformat/framework-agnostic way.

As a bonus, it also includes a rant on the fediverse & RSS3.

Bit of background: this is sortof the opposite of 'metaverse' or game-things.
Perhaps extremely boring and educative at the same time.
Interactive spatial books so to speak.

More info: https://xrfragment.org
I maintain dependencies for a lot of people--nowhere near operating systems or stdlibs, but my OSS gets fairly broad use--and I try very hard not to change their APIs too much! It's a real concern.
I don't know if I agree with the argument regarding durability vs elastic execution. If I can get both (with a nice API/DX) via something like Temporal (https://github.com/temporalio/temporal), what's the drawback here?
> The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements

Isn't the same happening with video games? I've seen video games remove some music from their soundtracks as their limited-time licenses lapsed.
Organizations should absolutely have avoided funding events in the US while we had a Muslim ban. The US is a big market so unfortunately some organizations sell out their values and do things here anyway. But we should obviously be held to the same standards as everybody else.
I should have quoted the generalized middle statement I was responding to

> AI is all about how much compute dollars it can generate for the cloud providers.

If the providers wanted to extract more money they would not create custom hardware which reduces overall costs and prices to users.

I would argue that this is actually more about ensuring NVidia doesn't have a monopoly on hardware and alleviates us from having to pay for Nvidia profits through our cloud providers.

Azure is going down the same path here: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/15/23960345/microsoft-cpu-g...
> This is exactly my point. You bolt on ever more Serverless offerings to accomplish any actual goal of your application. SNS notifications is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to think about, code around, and pay for. I have Phoenix.PubSub.broadcast and I continue shipping features. It's already running on all my nodes and I pay nothing for it because it's already baked into the price of what I'm running – my app.

I think this is fine if and only if you have an application that can subscribe to PubSub.broadcast. The problem is that not everything is Elixir/Erlang or even the same language internally to the org that runs it. The solution (unfortunately) seems to be reinventing everything that made Erlang good but for many general purpose languages at once.

I see this more as a mechanism to signal the runtime (combination of fly machines and erlang nodes running on those machines) you'd like to scale out for some scoped duration, but I'm not convinced that this needs to be initiated from inside the runtime for erlang in most cases -- why couldn't something like this be achieved externally noticing the a high watermark of usage and adding nodes, much like a kubernetes horizontal pod autoscaler?

Is there something specific about CPU bound tasks that makes this hard for erlang that I'm missing?

Also, not trying to be combative -- I love Phoenix framework and the work y'all are doing at fly, especially you Chis, just wondering if/how this abstraction leaves the walls of Elixir/Erlang which already has it significantly better than the rest of us for distributed abstractions.
Probably thanks to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Soghoian.
Very cool!
What's the difference between WinLang and Serverless?
I thought so too but no, Gemini _Ultra_ is supposed to beat GPT-4. The one available through Bard is Gemini Pro. The wording sure is confusing!

Looking at the technical report [1], on selected benchmarks, rounded score in %:

Dataset | Gemini Ultra | Gemini Pro | GPT-4

MMLU | 90 | 79 | 87

BIG-Bench-Hard | 84 | 75 | 83

HellaSwag | 88 | 85 | 95

Natural2Code | 75 | 70 | 74

WMT23 | 74 | 72 | 74

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
>We don’t want to learn that this thing that’s really important is maintained by a guy living in a basement on public assistance.

Seems like that would have been the very kind of thing that would be good to find out, so they could do something about it.

But I get the idea on finding out about a guy in a basement that they would kick him to the curb ASAP regardless of cost, rather than even consider taking action to get him off public assistance and into a fully sustainable future.
In case you've never organized events before, it's a bit of a catch-22. You need to be prepared to accomplish what your funding request entails before you are awarded, to the degree of satisfaction of the grantor.

When the criteria and timelines are unclear, as they were here, the requestor is put in a position where budgeting becomes a more serious jeopardy to an event than any planning concern.

The PSF should have responded. There's really no cause for what they did, even if it was only miscommunication.
Why? Google is an international organization and its technical employment is heavily skewed towards these two origins. Also Americans come from other places? Regardless of their last name…

What is this about?
I haven’t delved into it, but you likely lose the ability to round-trip your json strings, just as in postgreSQL’s jsonb type.

Jsonb_extract(jsonb(foo), '€')

likely

- will remove/change white space in ‘foo’,

- does not guarantee to keep field order

- will fail if a dictionary in the ‘foo’ string has duplicate fields

- will fail if ‘foo’ doesn’t contain a valid json string
It doesn't seem like enough. The PATRIOT act has been on the books for 20+ years now and we only rarely get a peek at what it's being used for. James Clapper (in)famously lied to Congress[1] and still got to keep his job, so I'm not sure about accountability either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clapper#Testimony_to_Con...
Polymer-Metal Lattice Composites via Hybrid Additive Manufacturing
>you can easily infer what the appointment was because the phone call will mention the name of the doctor or office and you can look that up plus all the details they discuss

You're assuming these things are mentioned. "Hi, I'd like to book/confirm an appointment with Dr. Jones." doesn't leak information about "abortion".

Yes, these things obviously depend on what information is transmitted. The point, however, is that metadata more reliably transmits sensitive information than does "the data".
The government should forbid the labeling of “buy” or “purchase” of anything that can be revoked after the sale.

If it can be revoked, then it should be labeled “rent”, with the appropriate time frame. Even if it means businesses have to label it “rent - until an unknown time in the future when we go out of business or drop the license or decide to ban you”.
Can anyone please de-lingo this for me? Is Gemini parallel to Bard or parallel to PaLM 2 or… something else?

In our experience OpenAI’s APIs and overall model quality (3.5, 4, trained, etc) is just way better across the board to the equivalent APIs available in Google Cloud Vertex.

Is Gemini supposed to be a new option (beyond PaLM 2) in Vertex? I literally can’t make heads or tails on what “it” is in practical terms to me.
Cisco Umbrella is what OpenDNS Umbrella DNS protection is called today after the acquire.

I'd say it's due to some DNS "protection" config on a corporate or public access point, or maybe on a corporate laptop or device.
> I frankly don't care what's legal or not at this point.

Oh, but you should - your freedom may depend on it.

> police state has gotten out of control, and needs to be rolled back

Maybe, but this is the world we presently find ourselves living in, and we can either choose to become empowered with knowledge about it, or throw a hyperbolic tantrum and wish for the moon.

> I don't want to live in a society where I can be stopped and asked for identification by law enforcement at any time.

You don't, at least not in the US. If you took more time to care about the laws you decry, you would know there is no such requirement, unless you have been suspected of a crime by a lawful sworn agent of the state. Which is a reasonable compromise in a society.

> smugglers and tax evaders who signed the Declaration of Independence ... would probably not be in favor of the ever-growing police state we have today

I agree. Those individuals knew well what an unchecked government can do, and took many reasonable precautions to safeguard against such infringements and tyranny. They were of course imperfect in their implementation, but the principals they set forth (freedom of speech, defense, religion, &c.) formed a radically different society to anywhere else on the planet today. Which is why I'm always puzzled when people disregard their hard work to take some agency's word and propaganda at face value, rather than consulting the original tenets which founded this great country.
What is the point of a union without collective bargaining is what I want to know.

It sounds like what anti union people like to portray them as. A tax on employees and nepotism.
There’s probably some you’ve missed but yeah, I like the “they can’t do this because of * “ comments.

Reminds me of the Eufy issue where they said everything was encrypted except for push notification images.

Hard to pick the most appropriate Orwellian quote. "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." ~ George Orwell
Google's Gemini isn't the generative AI model we expected
Well, the a fine tuned version of the Pro model now powers Bard - which is free; so it’s probably quite cheap (to Google at least).
What about WebPush on Firefox? That uses Mozilla's servers right? At least on Android? Could the govt be doing the same to Mozilla?
Raising Funds for an App by Providing Web Development Services
Hi guys,

I'm the guy behind Taskwer. Taskwer is a crowdfuding platform which allows people to raise funds for their goals e.g. education, travel, business ventures etc. What makes Taskwer different is that people don't have to ask for donations, instead they can offer services. Services can range from in-person services like tutoring, baby sitting, home repair and online services like writing, graphic design, software development etc.

I've been building this app for some time now, most features have been implemented but there is still a lot of work to do, many features I would like to add but even more importantly, I have to focus on getting users and building community around it. This project has been bootstrapped so far and I don't have a marketing budget for it so I would like to raise $20,000 to take this app to the next level.

Also, raising funds for something and offering services in return is a new concept and with this campaign I want to see if this is a viable concept. I will be my first user and I will see first hand if this is something people find useful or not.
> presumably GPT4 will have grown as much as well

Most of the comments I see on Hacker News claim ChatGPT is getting worse at different things (though I don't believe those claims).
I wish there was some way to compress JSON data across multiple rows, I often have very similar blobs in each row. Or some other way to reduce amount of storage for a lot of similar blobs across many rows, for example 10kB JSON where only one or two keys are different.
Even if they're perpetually a year behind, that's a strong competitive spur to keep OpenAI on the move.
Oh cool! Thanks for the reply, haven't had time to watch the screencast yet. Looking forward to it.
While I 100% agree and support having physical copies, it's very frustrating that doing so (at least with a PS4; no personal experience with other recent consoles) means that you can't play the game without the disc in the system, even if 100% of the data is installed on the internal hard drive. Hell, even if the half that data has been changed by post-release updates.
File Stores Live Demo Recap and Workflows
For anyone interested, there is a great book based on the infocom game called The Zork Chronicles by George Alec Effinger. I’m presently working with the rights owner to produce an audio version of the book.
Does Functional Programming Matter to You?
Hackers breach US govt agencies using Adobe ColdFusion exploit
Can it convert to pdf already received email ?
You do realize that 20 years ago it was wrong to be gay in various US states, right? And I'm saying this with the consideration that most of the world sees the US as the most advanced country on the planet.
It has access to the Internet and is free to search for the right answer.

If I ask it who it is, it says it is Bard. It is aware of the launch that occurred today. It cites December 6th.

It just very incorrectly felt that I was asking an ambiguous question until I restate the same question again. It's not great.
Kara Swisher: "You could come up with no women @nytimes?"
The article says "next year" - so that could be as soon as January, right?
On iOS, all notifications must go via the centralized APNS, but on non-Google Android (eg Graphene) it is possible to run the device with the Google FCM stuff blocked off. Some apps will break, but stuff that runs in the background for polling or does non-Google notifications will continue to work.
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It's to their detriment, also. Being told Gemini beats GPT-4 while withholding that what I'm trying out is not the model they're talking about would have me think they're full of crap. They'd be better off making it clear that this is not the one that surpasses GPT-4.
people dont realize that crumpled/bended material absorbs crash energy. Its a good thing as that energy is not transferred into a passengers, well apparently musk is one of those people
Apple has a form to de-register a number from iMessage here:

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
> just get everything dry

In many places this is not easy.
I've been working with people at GCP for months to get the right provisioning for TPUs for my company that spends many millions per year on GPU compute.

They take weeks to respond to anything, they change their minds constantly, you can never trust anything anyone says, their internal communication is a complete disaster, and someone recently told me they outsource a lot of their GCP personnel.

We went back to AWS and had a whole fleet of GPUs up and running within the week.

This is my 3rd extremely bad experience on Google Cloud. My last unicorn startup had several GCP-caused P0 production issues. They would update something internally with no announcement to customers and our production workloads would completely break out of the blue. It would usually take them days to weeks to fix it even with us spending tens of millions with them and calling support constantly. Everyone at our company was baffled at how bad the experience was compared to every other cloud provider.

I would not put anything serious there and I would never partner with GCP again.
[Author/submitter here]

Had you tried installing the `geany-plugins` package, as I mentioned in TFA?

It is around 10x the size of the editor itself, but that's still only about 30MB, and I think it can provide most of what you ask.
https://bard.google.com/updates The bard updates page says it was updated to Pro today. If it's not on Pro, but the updates page has an entry, then IDK what to say.
SRE Interview Prep Plan (Week 4)
And it is not like they would not know the first possible date when the license ends. This should be at the sale page and displayed prominently.
>and you just don't fight unions in EU.

Oh, yes you do - it happens all the time.
But this is exactly like sanctioning a country ruled by an oppressive regime because the regime is oppressive. You're just punishing the people who are already oppressed!
> but I usually just write that myself

Not saying you shouldn't, but part of the point of a framework is all the things you don't have to write yourself.

What I like about (say) Rails secret handling is that the secrets file is an encrypted file in the repo itself. This makes it so that you can easily check out and run different versions of the repo from different times and not have to worry about that one time you renamed an envvar or something. Secrets get version controlled together with the app. The autogenerated .gitignore even includes patterns for the key files so you have to go out of your way to check them into the repo. The downside is that merging encrypted files can be a right pain in the arse, for example when two devs added different secrets in different branches.
Well, that might depend on where you live. But point being that if your backups also break, you don't have the right to watch the thing any more.
If I buy digital content...

You can do all that when you buy digital content. The problem is that most stores aren't selling you the content - they're selling you a non-perpetual license to access the content while it's available from the store you bought it from. That's what needs to change. People need to actually buy the content and not rent it.
Nobody is prohibited from attending based on their political views. It’s only a question of whether those views cause someone to negatively impact other attendees that they have a problem. You can be completely anti-LGBT as long as you’re mature enough to only talk about Python at a Python conference.
is this a joke or not. Hard to say when discussing musk
I did some side-by-side comparisons of simple tasks (e.g. "Write a WCAG-compliant alternative text describing this image") with Bard vs GPT-4V.

Bard's output was significantly worse. I did my testing with some internal images so I can't share, but will try to compile some side-by-side from public images.