skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really hope that a European startup can successfully compete with the major companies. I do not want to see privacy violations, such as OpenAI's default use of user prompts for training, become standard practice.
There is a lot of hype around LLMs, but (BUT!) Mistral well deserves the hype. I use their original 7B model, as well as some derived models, all the time. I can’t wait to see what they release next (which I expect to be a commercial product, although the MoE model set they just released is free).

Another company worthy of some hype is 01.AI which released their Yi-34B model. I have been running Yi locally on my Mac (use “ ollama run yi:34b”) and it is amazing.

Hype away Mistral and 01.AI, hype away…
I’m not sure that any measure of trust could prevent someone from building up trust and then ripping the table cloth. You can only measure what you can observe, and short of something weird like a psychological profile I don’t think this could be in the scope of a trust metric.

The only way I can think of to try to avoid this is to simply make it more lucrative to continue with good behavior rather than liquidate the trust you’ve built up.
Erythritol, a Non-Nutritive Sweetener, Is a Palatable Ingested Insecticide
> Because of the weightless nature of space, any object that is unsecured or not tied down is likely to float off. And in the ISS, which is larger than a six-bedroom house, there's bound to be a plethora of good hiding spots for a lone-ranger tomato.

The part about the ISS being the size of a six bedroom house really stuck with me. I always imagine it being a single cramped room. But now it’s a floating McMansion!
There is always a "why", else what would be the use of teaching the subject in the first place, even to enthusiastic students?

OP's point is that helping the students understand the "why" might spark interest in them. Even if you reach one kid, you will have achieved your intended result.
And nothing at the same time
Maybe I missed something, but has anyone cut funding to a single program in the history of tracking government spending? Especially the FAA?
It’s replaced Google for me, for most queries.

It’s just so much more efficient in getting the answers I need. And it makes a great pair programmer partner.
That's great! Liberia can't afford to protect its forest, and this deal allows that.
$500 isn’t really enough to live on — do you have a job that you use to support yourself (or do you live in a low cost-of-living country)?
There is no way back to the way things used to be, but that doesn't mean it can't get even worse. If your house burns down there is no going back to your house not being burned down, but it's still better to put out the fire before it burns the neighborhood down too.
Not OP but I used it very successfully (not OpenAI but some wrapper solution) for technical/developer support.
Turns out a lot of people prefer talking to a bot that gives a direct answer than reading the docs.

Support workload on our Slack was reduced by 50-75% and the output is steadily improving.

I wouldn’t want to go back tbh.
The old open source, but we'll host it for you? I think Bezos is going to be in fits of evil laughter about that model in 5 years, as all the open source compute moves to the clouds, with dollars flowing his way.

But one thing Mistral could do is have a free foundational model, and have non-free (as in beer, as in speech) "pro" models. I think they will have to.
Sorry I don't know that expression, can you clarify what you mean?
Every Tesla from late 2014 onward. My May 2014 Tesla has no autopilot. That really hurt at first... buy a car for over $100k and it's obsolete a few months later when Autopilot and dual motor were announced.
Does Anthropic count as European?
Most people who write online aren't doing it in a code editor with a Markdown plugin.

For the overwhelming majority of the 'written web', writers are drafting in Word or Google Docs and sending them in for review.

Why would people use Word?

- 'just works', everyone knows how to use it

- Local-first backups. Good luck trying to extricate your posts from WP's MySQL DB if the site breaks.

- Lots of active bloggers are from the Windows XP era when there weren't 'sexier' options like Google Docs

- Has a powerful version history and accept/reject change features, essential if you have a copy editor or your work has multiple authors.
Zero moat. Everybody's doing it.

I suppose they could be the Google to everyone else's Yahoo and Dogpile, but I expect that to be a hard game to play these days.
You Can Select Multiple Tabs in Safari, Chrome, Firefox
The why the course is useful to know may not actually ever be relevant to the students why they’re taking the class, and no amount of informing the student how it’s useful will assist them. Knowing firsthand the value of tax knowledge doesn’t mean I have any level of enthusiasm about my taxes…

Btw, for your baking example: the great British bake off is a wildly popular show and yet almost none of the people I know who are fans care to even try to learn baking themselves. I just don’t think it’s a think that happens to any degree you think it does.
Wow. I'm going to give each family member a password and make them prove that they're real when they call me :)
I tried for a bit to understand this paper since the result, if true, seems extremely significant.

If I understand correctly they are saying that non renewable resources, specifically oil, will soon run out, leading to a collapse in industrial output which in turn leads to a loss of agricultural efficiency and thus famine.

This seems like complete nonsense? You can make a model say literally anything...
This is a cool talk, thanks for posting it. One cute thing tools like `trippy` could do (from the talk) would be the reverse lookup on the peer /30 address for all the intermediate hops. I don't know if `trippy` does this (I've installed and played with it but not carefully), but you could also color-code latency spikes that persist into future hops.
Would an encrypted repo not completely obfuscate history?
In a Darknet Diaries episode from a while back, I recall a three letter agency person saying something along the lines of "oh, haha they are running desktop Linux, those guys never run anti-virus software, this will be easy..."

Can anyone give me any more depth on this? Is a typical desktop Linux distro install more likely to be susceptible to attack by a nation-state level actor?
There's a misunderstanding here: I'm not saying "don't complain". Complaining in itself is fine, and others are complaining on this topic in a way that looks OK to me (and will probably be more efficient too). It's the nature of this specific article complaint that I have a problem with.

I agree with @tarsius on this: just give the discussion (and patches) some more time, and it's likely to end just OK from past experience.
Perhaps you could mention what these improvements are or give a link to the messages you're getting this information from?
The report doesn't say that collapse is 'imminent'; it says that it would eventually lead to collapse, with their assumptions, one of which is that population keeps growing exponentially. Population is already collapsing, so the whole model goes to trash bin with that in mind.

Also, the model doesn't take account technological progress or mining resources from solar system etc. It's a very simple model with many faulty assumptions.
> In a significant development for the European artificial intelligence sector, Paris-based startup Mistral AI has achieved a noteworthy milestone. The company has successfully secured a substantial investment of €450 million, propelling its valuation to an impressive $2 billion.

I’m cracking up. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist to read this and immediately conclude it’s AI-generated. I mean, they didn’t even try to hide that. Haha.
The parent did not say "we know there is no way back now, there is only doom ahead."

They said "every step on our current trajectory could represent a threshold triggering processes past which there is no return", and while it's left implied, the implication is that maybe we should consider stopping our current trajectory an emergency, much in the same way that someone who realizes they're as yet intact within a minefield might stop blithely strolling along even if the next step is only a marginal risk, not a guarantee of disaster.
In case you are wondering, this is most likely alluding to a cartoon: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Textual description if you prefer that: in front of the skyline of a derelict city, a man in a torn suit and a few children in similarly ragged clothes are sitting at a campfire. The man says: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.
Working from home, you can wear clothes that are less polished and professional. (Depending on the needs of the day, you might not even need to take a shower and get properly dressed at all!)

You can pop back down to the kitchen at 9:15 and grab a breakfast to bring back to your seat.

You can hear the dog barking to get back in right from your desk, rather than having to wait for them to be done, then put them in the crate, before you go.

You know that the route to your desk won't have a random delay of 0-20 minutes, so you have to leave early just to guarantee arriving on time.

You know that there won't be a line at the coffee.

Even ignoring all those little improvements, there's a big difference between "the maximum speed I can get from bed to door in an emergency" and "the speed I am comfortable moving to get ready to go every morning of every workday."
Whenever I read something like this I really struggle to gain an intuition about how the model functions. That is, what inputs is it most sensitive to, or what kinds of projections of the variables cause which kinds of behavior, etc.?

I feel like what I need in order to really internalize something like this is a game based on the model, where I can play with different variables and see how things play out over time. Otherwise it's just a bunch of figures and conclusions that I am unable to build any intuitive connection to.
that's really interesting to hear. so you're saying people got fatigued once "Web 2.0" was becoming a thing? (not that Web 2.0 started with social media, but I think it blew up in the early 2000s at least).
I was genuinely seeking feedback. I use argparse regularly. I have found it somewhat difficult to use when creating nested subparsers. That Click is part of the The Pallets Project gives me more confidence in it being maintained indefinitely, but ...
The costs of the Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon were very, very high. Both could have been averted at trivial expense with simple changes to the design.

Fukushima:

badthink - the seawall is high enough that it will stop tidal waves

goodthink - what happens when the seawall is overtopped? Answer: the backup generators drown. Solution: put the backup generators on a platform.

Deepwater Horizon:

badthink - the pipe is strong enough to never break

goodthink - what happens when there's enough force to bust the pipe off? Answer: the pipe flow cannot be shut off. Solution: put a fuse (a weak spot) above the valve, so when the pipe busts off, it breaks above the valve, and the valve can be turned to shut off the flow. (The valve was located on the sea floor.)
Source,

https://blog.sonatype.com/npm-packages-caught-exfiltrating-k...
Not OP, but For me:

- Writing: emails, documentation, marketing - Write a bunch of unstructured skeleton of information. Add a prompt about the intended audience and a purpose. Possibly ask it to add some detail.

- Coding: Especially things like "Is there a method for this in this library" - a lot quicker than browsing through documentation. Some errors - copy-paste the error from the console, maybe a little bit for context, and quite often I get the solution.

And API based:

- Support bot

- Prompt engineering of some text models that normally would require labeling, training, and evaluation for weeks or months. A couple of use cases - unstructured text as an input + prompt, JSON as an output.
They're selling to startups, not consumers.

The good startups are building, fine tuning, and running models locally.
I'm not sure that the general population would understand three different similar actions of trust, when the difference in effect to them personally is 0.
> I feel like if you have to specify “technically”, you agree with me that it is basically a subscription.

No, I am not. The "technical" part here is the "fallback" in "perpetual fallback license".

Appreciate your opinion and I'm sure many think the same way.

But selling perpetual licenses just won't work for me. It's not sustainable, especially for this kind of app.
"With their feet chained, and dressed in rags, Apuleius describes the workers as having “eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness they could barely see, and like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash.”

"The donkeys were no better off: “Their flanks were cut to the bone from relentless whipping, their hoofs distorted to strange dimensions from the repetitive circling, and their whole hide blotched by mange and hollowed by starvation.”

From Book IX of “The Golden Ass” by the second-century author Apuleius
Dario is italian-american?
„Rival companies like OpenAI and Google argue that the open-source approach is dangerous and that the raw technology could be used to spread disinformation and other harmful material.“

That argument is complicated in itself because it means that the technology shouldn’t be in the hands of those companies.

I think open source is the better and safer approach.
I think there are enough genuine use cases. People are saving time using AI tools. There are a lot of people in office jobs. It is a huge market. Not to say it won't overshoot. With high interest rates valuations should be less frothy anyway.
Worse: according to YouTube policies, you are not even allowed to even use public domain material that is not created by you or a nation-state government in the first place. For YouTube purposes, you have to assume as if copyright is a perpetual, irrevocable, fully transferrable right. Yes, you read it right: fair use is allowed in YouTube, reuse of public domain is material is not.
> Given the current state of economic inequality we're trending away from conditions that will lead to full employment if AI wipes out large swathes of jobs.

Based on what evidence? Do you think better ML will create no new opportunity? What does economic inequality have to do with whether new companies or services are built using new ML tools?
We can mine it an burn it as fuel,

Ot we can let it pollute our atmosphere.
thats not at all what they said, those are words you are putting in their mouth/post. I find this kind of automatic dismissal of reasonable caution and critisism being instantly conflated with "doom" to be the most conversation-halting counterproductive behavior pattern these days.
It’s not 1:1 the same thing though. Gpt4 chat does web search for research, tries to run python code etc
> If there's no way back, then why bother with painful mitigation efforts?

Because there's a way forward
Low content reply I know but it's great to see ICAP having the mindshare to appear in this discussion on HN. It's such a great paper and concept. I also think it has a lot to offer practitioners by making "active learning" a defined and delineated idea.
You mind sharing what you find so amazing about Yi-34B? I haven’t had a chance to try it.
I tend to not like this extra step of managing submodules, but to each their own. Often enough I'm looking at many packages at once. I guess you have to globally gitignore the projectile file too to avoid committing them everywhere?
Can you link to what you read please
This world where the people running the government care what the populace thinks about their decisions reads like a utopian fantasy.
I found a few things surprising about this bug too, but this might be due to my own ignorance about how these processes work:

- I was expecting the package to either be revoked, or to have a new `6.1.64-2` version being published with the previously good known state.

Maybe it wasn't done because it was not possible (mirrors being write-only, and maybe other complications in publishing a 6.1.64-2).

- I was expecting some guidelines to be published for affected machines. I've seen questions being asked [1], but no answers to them yet (so users are not sure if it would be safe to rollback to the previous kernel version (6.1.55-1) or not).

Maybe it's because the problem is not well understood yet, or maybe there are not enough people available to answer such questions on a weekend?

If someone can provide some context about "how these things work", it would be interesting to learn more about this.

[^1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057843#33
Or another way to put it - if you are an enterprise based in Europe that needs to stay compliant, future regulation will make it very hard to not use Mistral :P.
What has American slavery to do with Arab imperialism?
NGO's hate it when a bigger player with more resources eats their cake. Their only recourse, it seems, is to complain about the semantics of how the new kid is punching wrong.
There are a fair amount of backups in your car. For example, the braking system is dual. There's also engine braking and the parking brake that can be used. All the "energy absorbing" features are a backup for when you crash.
The story of what happened in the cockpit during the failure is just as interesting! The captain made a number of right decisions in a very challenging situation that allowed the plane to safely land.

Mentour Pilot did a video on that: https://youtu.be/JSMe1wAdMdg?si=YSgbqFpR_EBe-FvX
LLMs are useful tools but they haven't worked so far for generalized cognition.
> What would the ceasefire have done at the end of the day?

It would better prove out that the UN is also a psychological operation to a non-trivial degree.

> Would the UN kick Israel out if they continue the war despite a UNSC vote?

The US is the military muscle of the UN, and as far as I can tell, Israel largely controls the US, at least with respect to Israel. Who Epstein worked for, and who has has on tape seems like a relevant aspect of this issue, that hasn't gotten much traction even on TikTok.

> When push comes to shove the UN has very little power here...

The UN, or at least the idea of the UN that has been distributed among the minds of people in Western countries, has massive power. Control people's beliefs and you can control the world, and the US and Israel are both masters at that game. For evidence, I present the conversations that take place on social media, including HN.

> ...and is at risk of going the way of the League of Nations if it pushes too hard without having any meaningful enforcement mechanisms.

Dare to dream! I can't think of any "reasonably" likely scenario how that could come about, but maybe I lack imagination.

I do however think the decades long psy op that Israel and the US have had going in this specific region is at serious risk though. However, I do not underestimate the "Public Relations / Journalism / etc" skills of who we're dealing with - I think one well designed "event" could easily put most people right back into their trance.
That doesn't matter too much, the corporate structure is more interesting.
answering to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589929

Are you a parrot or something?

No, I am a person and you are exploring limits of my famous patience which is allowed only to my students as long as they wish to learn.

Also I am very persuasive in following logic and being responsible for own words. The only sensible way to discuss hard issues and to keep being in sync in conversation.

>Do you not understand that NOT killing 20k Palestinians in 60 days is an option (and answers your question)?

Help me understand what you suggest exactly and what outcome you expect after Israel does it? Make your statement so we would be on the same page to discuss it. Then it actually would be possible to discuss it.

Don’t you think you should be responsible with your words and understand consequences of things you suggest before opening your mouth about such sensitive topics? I am getting sick of irresponsible people spreading BS around without ever stating what they say or thinking through the consequences of the things they suggest.

>I've posed several questions to you and you keep not answering them.

This is because you didn’t answer one and only question I ever asked you in the first place.
Makes me wonder why they didn't decree, "no using a register called ^g, that's a special character" and add a check when specifying a register. I bet it would break fewer workflows.
Will the last trillionaire left alive at the end of our species please turn out the lights?
Release small, open, foundational models.

Deploy larger, fine tuned variants and charge for them.

There’s a reason we don’t have the data set or original training scripts for mistral
Didn’t realise that, I thought they retrofitted a lot of hardware over the years.
Maybe those walls of text with testimonials AND THAT'S NOT ALL!!! work for some.

I lost the will to wade through to find out how much the courses are - how much are they roughly?
I'll share here my positive opinion of GitExtensions (on Windows). It has really helped me use and better understand Git, while also helping me define and share workflows with my colleagues..

Other GUIs, like the ones embedded in VisualStudio, VSCode or Rider, try to sell skipping some cognitive steps for some operations as simplifying or speeding up dev flow.
I find they are just offering extra (beyond what git itself offers) ways of shooting yourself in the foot.
Columbia and NYU Would Lose $327M in Tax Breaks Under Proposal
Maybe when it's more profitable for them to do something constructive?
Reminds me of Notch. He took his incredible Minecraft success and pitched this new game where you’d have a space ship and a CPU with limited resources. I downloaded some tech demo and… it was just another janky Java-based FPS engine. He had that adequate but short-lived card game but that’s about it.

I’m not sure there really is any surprise here. We all know that being a success doesn’t imply generalizable skill, whether it’s a one-hit-wonder song, game, app, or business.
Thanks for the kind words!

Yes, I'm fully aware of the fact that teaching isn't really a priority in academia - for that reason, I probably won't be reviving my class in the near future. I really do like teaching, but it doesn't get me much closer to any of my current goals.
To clarify the headline, the abstract ends in: "Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that erythritol may be used as a novel, environmentally sustainable and human safe approach for insect pest control."

Some casual searching suggests that erythritol may be effective against fire ants as well, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/jee/article-abstract/110/2/593/3063...
Yeah, well. The Dvořáček affair is certainly a serious allegation. Yet not something the general public can be a judge for. Given that the Czech authorities and courts did not pursue it, the rest of us can't either, if only for the lack of information.

As to the rest of it — authors routinely revise their works. The very notion that readers (or critics) get any say in this strikes me as bizarre. They get to observe the process and decide which version they like better, but nothing more. Ne supra crepidam.
Why would corporations get scared? Climate change is going to be such a cashcow, corporations can't wait for it to accelerate further
This is true, but the abuse would still be possible today if someone is reverse engineering software or talking to servers where everything is over APIs anyway. I'm talking about local interface decoupled with a local API from implementation. The problem today is that programmers can't compose or build software on top of other software they have.