skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Overwatch example does not really make sense. The author assumes that if people are frustrated by frequently losing, it would be logical to put in effort to improve their skills. But their win rate should remain mostly constant as their skills improve since at the same time they would be moving up the ranking and would face better players. So there is not a strong incentive for the average player to put large effort into improving in the rankings.

In real world activities (eg programming) your skill level is often directly tied to strong incentives such as income. I don't think it is reasonable to think that it would be as easy to move up in the "rankings" all the way up to 95% percentile.
Thanks a lot JohnFen.

One reason for writing the post and trying to create GIF-images from binary, was to come as close as possible to GIF format and especially the LZW-algorithm. To understand it in an intuitive way. To get a bit closer to the minds who created the algorithm in the first place.
If I recall correctly, that led to literal criminal fraud charges.

And iirc Tesla is also being investigated for fraudulent claims for faking the safety of their self driving cars.
The government should regulate more in that area
The red flag for me was that they started that demo video with a background noise to make it seem like it's a raw video. A subtle manipulation for no reason, it's obviously not a raw video.

The fact that they did not fact check the videos again makes me not particularly confident in the quality of Google's work. The bit where the model misinterpreted music notation (the circled area does not mean "piano"), and the "less dense than water" rubber duck are beyond the pale. The SVG demo where they generate a South Park looking tree looks like a parody.
XHTML strictness would have been a great start but at that point the "best-effort" <p><div>cat was out of the bag</span>

I mean what is worse? Incorrectness, or losing ad revenue :-)
Got any sources on this? I'm interested in the stats.
Zombiezen.com/go/SQLite reaches 1.0
Flexplay: Self Destructing DVDs
Construction of the lithium mine at Thacker Pass began in June, and it is expected to start producing lithium by 2026.

There is a (super nutty) environmentalist group and some Native Americans protesting and trying to delay the mine, but it looks like they have so far been unsuccessful at convincing judges, and blockers have been getting cleared out.

I consider myself an environmentalist, so I'm a bit sensitive about descriptions like "nutty environmentalist", but... the group protesting the Thacker Pass mine is weird and I think largely repudiated by other environmentalists. I mean, they're trying to stop the transition to clean energy. These guys advocate for total deindustrialization, return to a pre-agriculture way of life, only as many humans as the hunter-and-gatherer lifestyle can support, and they're... deeply anti-trans?
I think that all makes sense.

Things would have played out very differently if the board was more experienced and thoughtful. Their hearts might have been in the right place, but their actions were reckless and ultimately backfired.
This is the most beautiful comment I've ever read. Well done, Pavel!
AQuaSurF: Discover better activation functions for your ML task
AQuaSurF is a new algorithm that automatically discovers better activation functions for your machine learning task, helping to improve performance.

Here's how it works:

• Embrace data-driven insights: AQuaSurF analyzes thousands of activation functions across diverse architectures and datasets, identifying what truly matters for performance. No more intuition-based guesswork!

• Unleash the power of the AQuaSurF algorithm: This efficient algorithm leverages a unique surrogate performance measure to efficiently navigate the vast space of activation functions, uncovering hidden gems quickly.

• Customize and experiment: AQuaSurF's open-source code provides the flexibility to tailor the search to your specific needs and experiment with different search strategies.

• Benchmark and compare: Utilize the AQuaSurF benchmark datasets to compare the performance of various activation functions and evaluate the effectiveness of different search algorithms — in seconds.

• Challenge the status quo: Don't settle for the mediocrity of the mainstream. AQuaSurF empowers you to challenge the status quo and pioneer the future of deep learning. Discover the activation functions that will take your models to the next level and beyond.

Further reading:
• Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05785
• AQuaSurF — find a better activation function for your task: https://github.com/cognizant-ai-labs/aquasurf
• Act-Bench — test out new search algorithms (similar to NAS-Bench-101, etc.): https://github.com/cognizant-ai-labs/act-bench/
• NeurIPS link: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/71442
I'm not sure what the 352 is supposed to be. strengthlevel.com claims a 352 lb bench is ~95th percentile for a 180 lb male, but I've never seen anyone in a gym that can bench anywhere near that. IME even a 225 lb squat feels like 95th percentile. I don't think I've ever seen someone else do a 100 lb shoulder press (~20th percentile on SL). Usually I see something like 75 lb (doing fixed barbells), and once I saw 95 lbs.

The idea is most people who participate are probably closer to what you see at the YMCA or Planet Fitness, not a powerlifting gym. They could do a lot more with basic advice like "add weight".
I agree and the grain/transparency effect specifically looks like the gradients made using a (physical) airbrush that show up a lot in the Memphis style.

1. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1402316103/memphis-style-postmo...

(Scroll down about halfway for the next one)

2. https://www.chairish.com/product/6986561/vintage-1980s-memph...

3. https://glowgeometric.com/products/1980s-hollis-fingold-memp...
Holy crap that demo is misleading. Thanks for the link.
If you define "player" in this context as "person who bought the game and opened it at least once" then becoming top 90% in any given game really doesn't take much. If Steam achievements are accurate just playing the game for an hour will make you above average. Most people quit before that and thus have no time to learn the game.

I still agree with your last paragraph. In gaming as in professional life, a T-shaped skillset is really useful. Having broad knowledge and experience, even if it's mostly shallow, is incredibly useful.
Memray: Python memory profiler
It also helps raise public awareness of the issue. Most people have no idea how much info automakers are sucking up about consumers. All the “connected” infotainment systems in modern vehicles can phone home whenever and with whatever data they want, and it’s all implicitly allowed by arcane provisions buried in the terms of service.
While most of the SVG text examples I've seen have a "word art" type of feel to them, I was mostly thinking it would be nice to show another common use case.

Recently, I've been using Standard Ebooks' toolkit to convert my Master's Defense into EPUB. SE uses SVG as its image format for covers - along with a few scaled JPGs. Unsurprisingly, all of this starts out as text and there is extensive use of text-anchor to get the alignment right.

Although they use XHTML as the primary input format, foreignObject is a concept I haven't encountered before, might be worth checking out...

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
You're totally right, my choice of language should have been better. Thanks for the correction!

Is the situation all that different for plastics? I'm not sure. We've been running health studies on them for a while and the harmful effects of BPA, Teflon, PFAS, and the androgenic affects of most polymers are pretty well known at this point.

My point is mainly that how long we've been using something is not a great way to determine safety.
How do you reach management/decision makers at companies that hide 'em?
It's well known by now that many companies have outsourced their entire support/customer service apparatus, allowing only live chat, email, and ticketing systems, while providing no phone support whatsoever - even for urgent matters. These overworked agents mainly parrot information from companies' knowledge base, while possessing little agency to make any kind of decision.

Perhaps you have spent hours or days going back and forth with a polite but clueless and disempowered agent about a matter that could be solved in 30 seconds by someone with decision-making authority.

My question: how do you track down management/decision-makers at these companies in order to escalate a problem and get an actual solution?

A current thorn in my side: Getaround.
"Friday"?
I like CARI a lot https://cari.institute/aesthetics
still is. Nikola's CEO, Trevor Milton, was convicted of fraud and is awaiting sentencing.
> Hardware: StableLM Zephyr 3B was trained on the Stability AI cluster across 8 nodes with 8 A100 80GBs GPUs for each nodes.

I might be missing it but do they say the number of training tokens that was used to train this?

This would help with efforts like TinyLlama in trying to figure out how well the scaling works with training tokens vs parameter size and challenging the chinchilla model.
I really appreciate the ending. I think that is good leadership.
> do I want integers like Python or integers like C? Yes.

Julia has BigInt and Cint. Maybe there could be a more Pythonic implementation that scales between machine types and BigInt. That would not be hard to implement in Julia. I just have not found a good use case.

What I like about Julia is that I can do both the high level and low level in Julia. Abstract code becomes concrete due to late binding.

You can access Libc.malloc and Libc.free if needed. See GPUCompiler.jl

The effect system exists. If you can prove no side effects, eager finalization is also possible. That is the finalizer and deallocation will run deterministically. It's new though so effect analysis is a mostly manual affair at the moment.
Aha, thanx for the info, I didn't know. So the canvas width and height should be the same as the width and height?
This is why I miss games like Unreal Tournament where they had 8 bot difficulty levels. When you were in the mood for a challenge you could turn it up, and when you were in the mood for some easy blowing stuff up you could turn it down. Now everything's skill-based matchmaking and as much as it can manage you're always up against opponents who are equally good to you.

Or playing against people who are way better than you and sandbagged their rating. But you can't have an easy game unless you make a second smurf account and do the same. Which is a dick move because the people on the other end of it didn't sign up to play a much harder opponent.
Yeah we really had a shot there.

There was a year or two where I actually began to receive autocrypt headers from random people and started encrypting with them.

Unfortunately, this momentum was completely killed by thunderbird, who decided to remove support and proceed to reimplement traditional manual email encryption :(
How it does it (from the article):

> It does so with colorimeters, which detect the color produced when certain reagents mix with those compounds. This is similar to how a woman might look for a blue or pink line on a pregnancy test.
Even at its peak, it barely caused a change in battery prices.

It's going to be really hard to undercut oil by dropping lithium prices, as nickel is a bigger contributor to cost.
I think you can fairly ascribe a lot of negative attributes to Sam, but an unnatural thirst for money isn't it. Nothing about anything he does makes me think he's motivated by increasing his personal net worth.
It's a devastating weakness only if you use it in a very certain manner.
The Red Hat deal was relatively small at $34B.

Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 Trillion.

IBM is only at $146 Billion. But IBM still has a higher head count.
TFA talks about a tender offer, which allows employees to sell their shares at almost a 3x valuation compared to earlier this year. This already is a "massive pay day".
That will only work once if the channels are monitored.
As someone who used to be an avid gamer and reasonably competitive, "a little bit of careful self-reflection" is definitely not enough to get you in the top 5%. Top 20%, sure, because the bottom 50% doesn't even try, and the next 30% tries just enough to learn the basic mechanics.

You need a certain time commitment and the ability to learn reasonably complex abstract mental models. Learning curves for many games are in the 1000s of hours. It's just not easy to fit into a busy work schedule.
Speaking as an American, it's because we have a long history of collaborative efforts between capital and government to depress or destroy labor movements. The black/white perspectives on strikes is one such example, particularly because almost all of our jobs start with some anti-labor training [1]. There was also the air traffic controller strike that was deemed illegal by Ronald Reagan [2] and the more recent efforts by companies such as Starbucks outright shuttering stores or harassing employees to stop unionization.

Within this framework, there's a lot of people who view strikes as not just wrong but morally wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j3ZNUxqo9M (this is an older example, but this is the kind of stuff I saw when I worked for target long ago)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
I'm curious as to whether an "association" legally implies those who have membership in a union, or more generally covers coordinated action between union members and non-members, or even coordinated action between non-members alone.
The trend towards fractioned vegetable oils worries me. Not in any "data" way, just that I have a standing suspicion that we evolved eating things closer to their "whole" state, and wandering too far from that may have unforeseen consequences.

Saw an ad on craigslist recently for several tons of surplus "soy protien isolate"; sacks of snowlike powder, offered as a livestock feed additive. Can't imagine how that came to wash up on the shore like this but it looked suspicious. the product itself, not this specific instance.

That said, my contrary says there's things like cheese that hafta be counted as ultra processed. the whole class of fermented foods probably joins it. Some of the more obscene sausage recipes absolutely count as unfit for living things.

Yet we manage to use these things with reasonable moderation. they enhance our diets and our cultures in ways we're willing to pay some costs for. Not just in the abstract "those canned weenies will kill you someday" way but in the immediate gastric distress everybody knows a good story about. "All you can eat wings night, man... Couldn't leave the house for 3 days."

I've got severe restrictions on what i can digest anymore. There's some ingredients I know to avoid, but I can't say in my case that I see many hard connections there. Its more my sensitivities than the ingredients becoming ever more complicated chemistry treatises.
This will only work once.
animations with the <title> tag
last 5%?

I've been top 1% and slightly below 1% at peak in video games that have milions of gamers and I wouldnt say that top 5% is filled with "truly talented people"

Top 5% is just decent people, but they are very, very, very far from top 0.1, 0.5%, etc.

At 1% I've been faaaaar from 0.5%, 0.1% people.
> you will never cross pollinate

See there's the mentality I'm calling self soothing. Your mental model of what makes someone excel seems to build off of what you like to do. One thing is to pursue extra information, another is to believe the sole way to excel is by doing the things you do.
What would be the point of a lawyer using chatGPT if it had to root through every single reference chatGPT relied upon? I don't have to doublecheck every reference of a junior attorney, because they actually know what they are doing, and when they don't, it's easy to tell and wont come with fraudulently created decisions/pleadings, etc
Because it is assumed that it can think or/and reason. In this case, knowing the concepts of density, the density of a material, detecting the material from an image, detecting what object this image is.
And, most importantly, knowing that this object is not solid. Because then it could not float.
No, but most people tend to make a mental note of which companies tend to deliver and which ones work hard to mislead them.

You do understand the concept of reputation, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPUq31JZFsA
Here's the missing link to the referenced article:

Radio Architecture Matters: A Review of RF Sampling vs. Zero-IF:

https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/radio-architect...
It also says the attribute of squeaking means it'll definitely float
I've dealt with indoor flooding in the past and was recommended Decon 30[1] by an experienced remediator. Its main active ingredient is thymol (from thyme) and it's EPA approved for fungicidal, bactericidal, and viricidal use. Pretty easy to find on Amazon or at a janitorial supply store. Safety data sheet here[2].

I found it generally more pleasant and less harsh on the skin in particular than hydrogen peroxide or cleaners from Clorox.

[1] https://benefect.com/us/products/decon-30/

[2] https://benefect.com/pdf/decon-30-product-data-sheet-usa.pdf
He has said in podcasts he is motivated not by the money but by the power he has at OpenAI
No it's not (according to their benchmarks).

Zephyr-7B-B still beats it in most benchmarks but it's close.

This model is almost Zephyr-7B-B performance at 3B size which is a lot better for inference requirements.
By comparing on benchmarks that are either limited, or have data leaks, or in most cases just don't make sense in terms of usability - I've personally stopped looking at benchmarks to compare models. Personally, if I want to try a new model I hear a lot of chatter about, I use it for a few hours in my daily workflow. My baseline is GPT3.5 and GPT4, and I compare the models with them in terms of my day to day usage.
No PostNord doesn't know and cannot ask.
I hope they are working on improving firewall traversal. Lots of firewalls don't allow symmetrical UDP NAT ports, causing clients to fall back to DERP relays on TCP port 443. It's a lot slower. It is possible to work around this by statically mapping inbound UDP ports but that is clearly not an ideal situation. I generally love Tailscale though, amazing work all around.
Yes, the battery drain on iOS is also the thing stopping me from having it on my iPhone. Wireguard is way better in that regard, but has other issues (e.g. no split dns, no dns re-resolve for dyndns or for network changes).

Other than that tailscale is really great. It just works.
AI Is Already a Commodity
Almost every apple product produced has included "AI" coprocessors for years at this point, and I would guess they've sold many more of those to many more people than Nvidia has. The limiting factor is the ability of 3rd parties to use that hardware, which is what it seems apple has been trying to do for the last few years.
> But UAC is not built into the motherboard, it's just a part of modern Windows, and it's only a factor when running Windows.

Yes, this is why I don't put a lot of thought into UAC stuff -- the only place I use Windows is at my job, where it's required.

Which means that SecureBoot is an even greater worry for me.
SICP is a textbook. The Little Schemer is a tutorial. You sit down with a pen, paper, and the book. Then you cover the answer column in the book, read the question / prompt and try to write an answer on your paper. You compare your results with the books suggested answer and work your way through it question by question.

So it is kind of a way of create a Socratic dialog with a book. I found it to be a great way to engage with the material in a way that promotes understanding in a hands on way, but without putting a computer in the way. When you are writing your answers you have to be more intentional than just, "well lets see if this works."
I remember this from back in the day. This invokes severe nostalgia pangs.
Does it matter at all with regards to its AI capabilities though?

The video has a disclaimer that it was edited for latency.

And good speech-to-text and text-to-speech already exists, so building that part is trivial. There's no deception.

So then it seems like somebody is pressing a button to submit stills from a video feed, rather than live video. It's still just as useful.

My main question then is about the cup game, because that absolutely requires video. Does that mean the model takes short video inputs as well? I'm assuming so, and that it generates audio outputs for the music sections as well. If those things are not real, then I think there's a problem here. The Bloomberg article doesn't mention those, though.
Oh, yes it is. It is a necessary step for all radar processing in FMCW systems.
...of those who even race many are there just to participate...

Raises hand! I'm a competent, but very average, bicycle racer.

The whole notion of 95 percentile here is super weird. For a large enough pool of people, being 95% is nowhere near elite.

So, I guess I agree with the thesis, but it's not some profound insight into the world.
Because they are working in the short term. Once corporations find a wedge, it's only a matter of time before they exploit it and reduce wages over the long run. I a glad that unions are taking a long view on this matter.
This kind of moral fraud - unethical behavior - is tolerated for some reason. It's almost like investors want to be fooled. There is no room for due diligence. They squeel like excited Taylor Swift fans as they are being lied to.
Call me old fashioned, but I would absolutely like to see autocorrect turned off in many contexts. I much prefer to read messages with 30% more transparent errors rather than any increase in opaque errors. I can tell what someone meant if I see "elephent in the room", but not "element in the room" (not an actual example, autocorrect would likely get that one right).
Now I'm curious - is this blog post licensed? It's essentially an adaptation of Andrej's talk and even if substack wasn't monetized this blog is definitely an adaptation/substitute of the original talk as the post itself advertises. The disclaimer at the top doesn't mention if it's in partnership with him or if it's licensed - I'd recommend clarifying how permission was obtained for the post or something like that so that some of the questions raised around copyright and IP are addressed.
It's funny because now the OpenAI keynote feels like it's emulating the Google keynotes from 5 years ago.

Google Keynote feels like it's emulating the Apple keynote from 5 years ago.

And the Apple keynote looks like robots just out of an uncanny valley pretending to be humans - just like keynotes might look in 5 years, but actually made by AI. Apple is always ahead of the curve in keynote trends.
Refact has a decent 1.6B model that I think is better

https://huggingface.co/smallcloudai/Refact-1_6B-fim
Yes, but typically the different optical properties are strictly localized in space. Air here and water there. In this paper it's basically like you have a pool full of water with a light beam traversing halfway to the ground and then you instantly turn the air in the pool into water and the light goes, "oh hell no" and backs out of there
webhooks were a phase we should have passed by now, not try to entrench with some standard. it’s a broken/obscure implementation of full duplex communications between two systems but thought up as if it were a luxury, auxiliary system whose downtime we should be able to tolerate. if we’re required to survive downtime of a webhook system, i think we’re right to ask: why are they there in the first place?
Hence the overwhelming number of hearts in the Twitter messages asking for the return of Sam Altman.
>The problem with raising pay across the board is that it reduces the value of money.

No, printing more money to make more loans and bail out the crony financiers causes a reduction in money value.