skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking last night about LLMs with respect to Wittgenstein after watching this interesting discussion of his philosophy by John Searle [1].

I think Wittgenstein's ideas are pertinent to the discussion of the relation of language to intelligence (or reasoning in general). I don't meant this in a technical sense (I recall Chomsky mentioning that almost no ideas from Wittgenstein actually have a place in modern linguistics) but from a metaphysical sense (Chomsky also noted that Wittgenstein was one of his formative influences).

The video I linked is a worthy introduction and not too long so I recommend it to anyone interested in how language might be the key to intelligence.

My personal take, when I see skeptics of LLMs approaching AGI, is that they implicitly reject a Wittgenstein view of metaphysics without actually engaging with it. There is an implicit Cartesian aspect to their world view, where there is either some mental aspect not yet captured by machines (a primitive soul) or some physical process missing (some kind of non-language system).

Whenever I read skeptical arguments against LLMs they are not credibly evidence based, nor are they credibly theoretical. They almost always come down to the assumption that language alone isn't sufficient. Wittgenstein was arguing long before LLMs were even a possibility that language wasn't just sufficient, it was inextricably linked to reason.

What excites me about scaling LLMs, is we may actually build evidence that supports (or refutes) his metaphysical ideas.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_hQpvQYhOI&ab_channel=Philo...
One hundred. Not great, not terrible.

Take him to the infirmary. Toptunov, take him! He's delusional. Flood attack, forged IP addresses. He'll be fine. I've seen worse.

You didn't see forged IPs. You didn't. You didn't!!! Because it's not there!
> does the world really FEEL that different now, than pre-internet?

Yes. You said it yourself: you used to have to WALK somewhere to look things up. Added convenience isn't the only side affect; that walk wasn't instantaneous. During the intervening time, you were stimulated in other ways on your trek. You saw, smelled, and heard things and people you wouldn't have otherwise. You may have tried different routes and learned more about your surroundings.

I imagine you, like I, grew up outside, sometimes with friends from a street or two over, that small distance itself requiring some exploration and learning. Running in fresh air, falling down and getting hurt, brushing it off because there was still more woods/quarry/whatever to see, sneaking, imagining what might lie behind the next hill/building; all of that mattered. The minutae people are immersed in today is vastly different in societies where constant internet access is available than it was before, and the people themselves are very different for it. My experience with current teens and very young adults indicates they're plenty bright and capable (30-somethings seem mostly like us older folks, IMO), but many lack the ability or desire to focus long enough to obtain real understanding of context and the details supporting it to really EXPERIENCE things meaningfully.

Admittedly anecdotal example:
Explaining to someone why the blue-ish dot that forms in the center of the screen in the final scene of Breaking Bad is meaningful, after watching the series together, is very disheartening. Extrapolation and understanding through collation of subtle details seems to be losing ground to black and white binaries easily digested in minutes without further inquiry as to historical context for those options.

I abhor broad generalizations, and parenting plays a large part in this, but I see a concerning detachment among whatever we're calling post-millenials, and that's a major, real world difference coming after consecutive generations of increasing engagement and activism confronting the real problems we face.
First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
Even a middle schooler would be able to link the actual RFC 793 instead of just rfc-editor.org
I think that is what I mean by reason. I set the bar for reasoning and AGI pretty high.

Though, I will admit, a system that acts in a way that’s indistinguishable from a human will be awful hard to classify as anything but AGI.

Maybe I’m conflating AGI and consciousness, though given that we don’t understand consciousness and there’s no clear definition of AGI, maybe they ought to be inclusive of each other until we can figure out how to differentiate them.

Still, one interesting outcome, I think, should consciousness be included in the definition of AGI, is that LLMs are deterministic, which, if conscious, would (maybe) eliminate the notion of free will.

I feel like this whole exercise may end up representing a tiny, microscopic scratch on the surface of what it will actually take to build AGI. It feels like we’re extrapolating the capabilities of LLMs far too easily from capable chat bots to full on artificial beings.

We humans are great at imagining the future, but not so good at estimating how long it will take to get there.
> an argument that we should use words as we damn well please instead of having a common standard that would allow us to understand each other

Bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?

Every single person has a language that’s unique to them, and there’s a tremendous amount of both redundancy and context, cultural and situational, that need to exist to convey meaning.

Obviously increasing deviation from the “standard” lexicon or “laws” of universal grammar would at some point fail to convey any meaning whatsoever, but given the context of this discussion, we’re not discussing egregious violations - merely creative and valid use of existing words which, if you read the other comments, is already standard in industry.

My role frequently requires me to explain nuanced technical details to less technical folks or those with differing technical expertise. Even in the same building, between native English speaking coworkers using language in a fully “standard” way, when sharing ideas, there needs to be a back and forth discussion to reduce ambiguity and converge into a commonly held mental abstraction for whatever it is being discussed.

Don’t believe me? Why do you think legalese exists? Legalese should be the culmination of precision in conveying meaning, but even with legalese, it’s up to the value systems and judgements of courts and judges to interpret the law.

Language is complicated. Try not to be too uptight about it. Have a beer. Relax.
I think this is basically how I use Excel, with a few other (nice but not game changing) features?
Am I missing something?
LISP machines may indeed have been as close to AGI as we have been.

However, I think we are just as close now.

AGI success, like all successes, is a thing declared not a thing achieved.

...anyway, if you want a LISP machine, put eMacs on a general purpose computer.

Good luck.
A Good Shower
LOL fuck the NYT

That's like suing someone who had an NYT subscription and read the paper daily for occasionally quoting a choice phrase verbatim. I've been quite critical of AIs impact on the livelihood of artists (whose economic position is precarious to start with, and who are now faced with replacement by machine generated art) but at the same time I reject the copyright complaint completely. Transformers are very obviously doing something else, similar to how a human learns and recreates; the key difference is that they can do it at scale unreachable by individuals.
Were the options available via ANSI.SYS a mix of a subset of the standard ones and a few non-standard? If I'm remembering rightly there, this may be a more accurate description if it targets that exact set of control sequences rather than any other.
Oh you're right, you can't remove the last option (just confirmed by trying).

It's the worse case then, and she'd have to change/remove her email from her Apple ID [1].

Apple should do better and make it easier in this kind of case. They already allow one to deregister a phone number from iMessage via a web page, how hard could it be for them to do the same for an email...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38780442
I'm excited about some of these Django updates - especially models.GeneratedField()
Adventures in Success [video]
Meanwhile I'm over here wishing I could make my Mac switch virtual desktops and windows quickly and seamlessly, but compared to Linux and even Windows, it feels dog slow. There's also a weird quirk of the AltTab app where sometimes you try to alt+tab back to a previous window, and the previous window+desktop appears, but the focus is actually still on the first window, so keyboard shortcuts go to the wrong app. You have to not only alt+tab, but then click on the window you just switched to, to change focus. Kind of insane that this basic desktop functionality doesn't work well on a $2,000+ machine.
> Every Covid-19 infection carries with it a 15% chance of Long Covid

Then 7% of the German population, 5.5% of the UK population etc.¹, should, as a lower bound because that's only confirmed cases (with PCR afaik), have long covid now, based on OWID²

The percentage should probably be double or quadruple, if you consider how many infections are asymptomatic or not tested for other reasons (no wish/need for medical help, mistrust of "the system"..). (Edit: yeah double is about right for the part of people that will never even have considered getting tested: an article³ cites a study from 2021 in which 40.5% of people who contracted the virus had no symptoms)

In reality, I'm not seeing one in ten persons crippled from covid

¹ those are simply the first countries I checked because I expect them to have good data, but probably that's representative for any ~densely populated region

² https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

³ https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/4-in-10-people-wit...
> LLMs have become a fundamental part of my work flow as a professional. GPT4 [...] doesnt have an ego about its incorrect statements when challenged on them.

To anthropomorphize it further, it's a plagiarizing bullshitter who apologizes quickly when any perceived error is called out (whether or not that particular bit of plagiarism or fabrication was correct), learning nothing, so its apology has no meaning, but it doesn't sound uppity about being a plagiarizing bullshitter.
> There's probably more plastic in the salt than iodine at this point.

Probably not in swiss salt tho (it's usually mountain salt, not sea salt).
> The entire system has been treating every borrower as if they were the worst possible borrower

Isn't that just the effect described in <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>?
From their perspective they're training a giant mechanical brain. A human brain doesn't need any special license agreement to read and learn from a publicly available book or web page, why should a silicon one? They probably didn't even consider the possibility that people'd claim that merely having an LLM read copyrighted data was a copyright violation.
Additionally if your concern is that artists and authors aren’t being paid, a 14 year copyright term is nothing. A corporation would just contract you to make a work, complete whatever minimum release is necessary to get copyright, then wait until it’s public domain to wide release a remastered version that they no longer have to pay royalties on since it is public domain.

Despite how many negatives the current copyright regime has, having to wait 70 years after the death of the author is far too long of a timeframe for that strategy to play out.
> Science journalism is abysmal and hyperbolic

Do you see the irony? What better describes social media? Personally, I see plenty of good, valuable, useful science journalism; it's got plenty of flaws, like any human endeavor - including social media comments.

But attacking journalism is normalized, and thus people know they can do it without being questioned and get some social media likes from it. It would be interesting to see the same responses turned on individual social media comments - what flaws could we find? :)

> For greater context, in the drug discovery world, "explainability" of QSAR/QSPR has been a longstanding goal. It's (rightly) not considered sufficient to have "black box" models that make predictions -- it's too expensive and risky to carry drug candidates into the lab based on the output of an algorithm, so subject-matter experts want to know why the algorithms are making the predictions that they make.

Ironically, that's what the OP is about; that was the point of their research.
If I install the plumbing in your house, you don't pay me every time you have a shower. I'm willing to concede an artist might be "better" than a plumber (commercially), but if copyright is intended to incentivise production of art, then 7 years seems perfectly reasonable time to let a work accrue some money before it goes into the public domain. 7+7 was in fact how copyright first existed.
That's pretty gross. I can't reify the desire for "business as usual" with the horrors I've seen Israel commit. I can't really stomach the idea of doing business with companies or people who support Israel. I'll stick with AMD in this case.
Wait until that reachs F1 and it will be 5 seconds.

The problem will be battery thieves.
Ia that really ironic though? If anything, it should be something we value. Granted, this was much later than would have been liked, like decades later. But a politician going, "oh, wait, that policy I helped passed turned out to have bad side effects. I see it now, recognize it and will do something about it." We have too many politicians who pass bad policy, and better yet pass it, watch it blow up in their faces and move on with their life to never revisit again. Chances are, most to all politicians are at some point going to pass bad policy, the important part is, recognizing when things go off the rails and correcting course.
It means you can easily use it from another program. Pretty much it has to be written in a language without a runtime that can expose a C interface, i.e. C, C++, Zig or Rust.
> Things like SASS are simply not needed anymore!

The problem with things that are not needed anymore is that they won't go away.

Finally CSS has also these nice QoL things that SASS has, then SASS would add new things simply to provide value.

Finally Javascript has all these nice things that make the framework redundant, then the frameworks add new things, of value, and remain relevant.

After a couple of iterations of these sorts of arms races, we suddenly have a big and complicated $BASE_THING, and an even more complicated $ADDITIONAL_THING.

It never ends - complexity in a specific software technology tooling, processes and development, much like entropy, only increases, it never decreases.
There haven’t really been all that many hardware exploits for us to judge Apple on this, have there?
In a discussion, one should strive not just to stick to saying things that are true, but to make sure that what they're saying is both true and relevant.

People should obtain their learning material legally. True statement (at least as "true" as any opinionated value judgement can be, I guess). The question is how, though, is that statement relevant here?

Even by the NYT's own telling (the way that OpenAI obtained their articles was from the NYT's website) what OpenAI did was not illegal copyright infringement. The problem is that NYT is under the impression that allowing search engines to access their paywalled stuff and hoping they don't do anything else with it besides putting up conventional, Google-style SERPs makes for copyright infringement if what one of them actually wants it for involves other reasons. It doesn't. There's an adequate legal instrument available for NYT to use if they want to enforce conditions on use: a contract. Do they have a contract that somebody violated? If not, they have no cause to go after anyone. And if they do have a contract that was violated, then that's still not copyright infringement—it's a breach of their contract.
Another drastic example of animal sleep being very different from ours is dolphins. Dolphins sleep "one hemisphere at a time".

> Research has shown that dolphins are able to sleep with only half of their brain at a time, a phenomenon known as unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS). During USWS, one hemisphere of the brain remains active while the other hemisphere rests. This allows dolphins to continue swimming, surfacing for air, and avoiding predators while still getting the rest they need.

Try that! :-)
> A corporation would just contract you to make a work

In that case, by definition, the artist was paid.
The article mentions that blind taste testing couldn’t detect it at 10x the strength.

Surely people test before claiming such things?

“Unicef, concerned about the sensitivity of children to odd flavours, commissioned a study in which rice was prepared with salt iodised at ten times the maximum recommended concentration. In double-blind taste tests, the iodine was undetectable.”
Of course not, but you can cite where specific facts or theories were first published. Now, I don't think that not doing so infringes any copyright interest or that doing so creates any liability, any more than if I cited to a scientific paper or public statement of opinion by someone else.
I don’t really see anything wrong with their security posture here.
You're definitely right that Boston Light is officially in Hull, but The Graves (still a USCG-managed lighthouse, and bigger than Boston Light) is in Boston. See https://arc-gis-hub-home-arcgishub.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/m...
He was reminded every day as his home canton still had high rates of gout and children being born deaf/mute.
Maciej has a real gift for writing. His three part travelogue of visiting Yemen has been on my mind a lot recently. He published the first installment just a few months before the civil war started. https://idlewords.com/2015/05/ta_izz.htm
That's a good point. The magazines are also high quality enough they became a standard on other platforms. The whole platform is well packaged.
See also:

"Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost" https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
Safari is not tied to OS updates on Macs.
I would be more impressed if it returned links to the specific RFCs and more specific pages elsewhere. What's a top-level link to OCW worth here? OCW is amazing, but has classes on practically everything. These are practically just domain names for "places to learn about the internet".
I think it might be more MS-DOS specific than the broader ANSI Art:

DOS 2.0 introduced the ability to add a device driver for the ANSI escape sequences: ANSI.SYS. Slowness, and the fact that it was not installed by default, made software rarely take advantage of it; instead, applications continued to directly manipulate the hardware to get the text display needed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

Anyway, rhetorically, art (the payload) is art, regardless of the technical means or difficulty.
I'm a big fan of listening to Oxide and Friends [1] on my commute. Two of my favorites this year were "On Silicon Valley Bank with Eric Vishria" [1] and "DTrace at 20" [2]. The SVB episode in particular was super interesting to hear from their perspective.

[1] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1255721

[2] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1503057
Do you see what social media has wrought? How can you trust the herd mentality? Is there a greater source of misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance in the history of humanity? (No.)

Regarding things I already know - or even OPs I've read but which most commenters have not - HN is mostly misinformation.

I participate in HN, obviously - only because I've found nothing better (a complement to it, in a way, and maybe there's no known way to improve).
>Techies almost always have a laptop, phone, and home desktop up at once

What definition are you using here? I like tech and worked as a software engineer (not working now), and I haven't owned a desktop in over a decade. If we're talking "almost always", I think these days I have 0 phones/laptops up most of the time followed by 1 in pretty close second place, and even having 2 (let alone 3 or more) is uncommon for me.
The original Glock 17 was named because it was the company's 17th patent. The models after seem to be sequential by release date. eg: The Glock 18 is the full auto version of the Glock 17. The Glock 19 is a compact version. The Glock 20 is the 10mm caliber version. And so on. This causes confusion because the Glock 44 is chambered in .22 long rifle, while the Glock 22 is chambered in .40 caliber, the Glock 40 is chambered in 10mm, and the Glock 45 is a 9mm handgun.

Also each Glock has different generations. The 5th gen Glock 17 definitely incorporates newer patents, but the model number hasn't changed.
Offtopic: dear owner of pdx.su, your RSS feed gives a wrong URL for your site.
It should be fairly clear from studying the structure of Julia that it was never meant to be simply a better Python.

Mojo also owes part of its design from the lessons it took from Julia (as per Chris Lattner [1]).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35791125
Given this is the Daily Mail, without reading the article I confidently predict this headline is a complete misrepresentation of what happened. Please don't give these arseholes the money they will earn from your clicks.
Yeah people keep talking about reverse engineering but it’s just as real a possibility that this was simply engineered to be there. Apple and the government made a big public show about the San Bernardino iPhone situation[1] but that could have easily been a cover to convince people the government can’t get in to iPhones - because eventually the government dropped the court case, got in anyway, and the whole thing was quickly forgotten.

We can imagine that the government either has ideological capture of apple - that the management of apple agree to install hard to exploit vulnerabilities tailored for US government use - or legal capture through FISA rulings.

I’d be curious if anyone can summarize the latest understanding of FISA court actions in this realm.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/28/apple-fbi...
Finding high quality for older or non-english shows might be of some difficulty but they're quite common for shows and movies released for english audiences

This is just a guess but requiring Widevine L1 might be enough deterrence for some groups to wait for highest quality BluRay releases
The last round of strikes by the writers and actors unions were about royalties.

Being paid for a spec or a per diem while making the movie can be peanuts. Big name actors and writers make percentages on the backend.
> It stays active for 6 months too

Are you sure it's 6 months? It's possible there might be different versions internationally, but the US version seems to claim 12 weeks (~3 months): https://us.bravecto.com/dogs/bravecto-for-dogs/
Does Lockdown Mode prevent agains this?
>Poorly educated

I find it is in fact the poorly educated who fetishize Rome. If you've never used any Greek math or studied the development of the early European universities then it is easy to see the the surface level buildings and statues of Rome where all roads lead to whereas looking at a maths textbook is all Greek to them. It's hard to accept Rome as being largely stagnant due to most people's unfamiliarity with the ancient world. Instead they compare Rome to the early middle ages in Europe as the barometer of a successful society for some reason.
Doesn't FoxConn already have empty factories up north somewhere? [0]

[0]https://www.theverge.com/c/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-...
They're not copies, no matter how much you want them to be.
So there is for Python, but it's still slow. JS has slow semantics. It can't be made in the same performance league as Julia.