skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This lecture covers Knuth's latest (and simplest-so-far) algorithm to solve the XCC problem; I'll describe XCC below.

The XCC problem is designed to solve problems that are NP-hard. So algorithms that solve XCC are not known to be polynomial-time. But they're interesting because they can solve a whole swath of problems that are difficult (not known to have a poly-time algorithm) and interesting. This is in the same world as SAT-solvers, in case you already know about those.

This particular Knuth lecture shows how you can simplify his original "dancing links" algorithm to a "dancing cells" version that no longer uses as complex a linked list structure internally, but rather uses flat arrays, although it does retain some link-like structure. The dancing cells alg isn't always better than dancing links, but for most of Knuth's test cases, this new version is faster.

Ok, what is XCC? It's the "exact covering with colors" problem. (Knuth mentioned that XCC doesn't yet have a wikipedia page, and maybe it should!) It's an extension of the "exact cover" problem -- you're given a set of items that should be covered, and a set of options (sets of items) that may cover some items. Each item must be covered exactly once (no more, no less). Now I'll add the "with colors" part: You can divide items into primary (these need to be covered exactly once) and secondary: these items may be either uncovered, or have possibly-many covering options, but the "color" of the coverings must be the same.

Here's a problem to help gain some intuition for XCC: Imagine trying to build an mxn word grid with valid English words. Each option can be either a word in a row or a word in a column. In this case your primary items could be something like "each row needs a word and each column needs a word." Then your secondary items would be the individual cells and each letter is a "color;" thus the use of consistent colors is a way to ensure that you can't assign different letters to the same cell.

Another description of XCC:
https://docs.rs/xcc/latest/xcc/

Word squares:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_square
Interesting.

I think the appropriation, privatization, and monetization of "all human output" by a single (corporate) entity is at least shameless, probably wrong, and maybe outright disgraceful.

But I think OpenAI (or another similar entity) will succeed via the Sackler defense - OpenAI has too many victims for litigation to be feasible for the courts, so the courts must preemptively decide not to bother with compensating these victims.
> You do copyright for content that you invented and which didn't exist before.

I dont think that's accurate.

The Copyright Act, § 103, allows copyright protection for "compilations (of facts)", as long as there is some "creative" or "original" act involved in developing the compilation, such as in the selection (deciding which facts to include or exclude) and arrangement (how facts are displayed and in what order).
I am very hopeful that combination treatment is available today and is just being figured out for safety/efficacy in those who suffer with long covid.

For example look at this study from Italy on antivirals + monoclonal antibodies:

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-6382/12/9/1460

14/15(93%) found viral clearance with a combined therapy.

13 patients were alive, asymptomatic, and negative for SARS-CoV-2 by 90 days. 2 passed away for other causes.

There are other existing literature on these things helping middle-aged people as well such as:

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/monoclonal-antibodies-n...

3 lives completely restored back to normal with the use of an existing monoclonal antibody just sitting on shelves.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073567572...

This isn't a perfect treatment that cures everyone, but the efficacy seems rather high and the safety profile already exists given how much this has been given in acute covid during the EUA.

Also there is an upcoming monoclonal antibody that just went into clinical trials for safety that acts like a "pan" mAb which can target all variants with high efficacy by regeneron(look for REGN17092 below):

https://investor.regeneron.com/static-files/a73a7d9c-591d-43...

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05923424?intr=REGN17092

Finally, there have been some people participating in the AER002 clinical trial (closest to Lilly's bebtelovimab) where they are seeing complete reversal of symptoms. The challenge is that there is existing literature suggesting both cases where people get better permanently and some people only are better for the duration of the half-life of the drug.

Either way you look at it, treatments are looking closer than ever.
FB likewise.
> I'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation.

I think it’s more nuanced than that.

Extending the “monkeys on typewriters” example, it would be like training and evolving those monkeys using Shakespeare as the training target.

Eventually they will evolve to write content more Shakespeare like. If they get so close to the target that some of them start reciting the Shakespeare they were trained on, you can’t really claim it was random.
Really two major parties. In 2010 neither of those parties gained enough seats in parliament to gain a majority so they formed a coalition with one of the minor parties which tipped the scales in their direction.

The system is somewhat archaic and well overdue reform but neither of the major parties wants that for obvious reasons.
This post by DHH [0] showed me that I need to take a good look at current CSS. (Scroll down for the styles screenshot)

I kept up with custom properties and some newer colour management but then kinda stopped. So now it's back to basics and re-evaluate how I approach styles. Not that all the features are required at all times, of course not. But it always pays to keep up with the underlying tech. And I find CSS uniquely fun to lean, as the feedback loops are nigh instant.

0 - https://world.hey.com/dhh/once-1-is-entirely-nobuild-for-the...
If NYT wins this, then there is going to be a massive push for payouts from basically everyone ever…I don’t see that wallet being fat for long.
Similarly, I’ve heard some people call early Forth systems of the 1980s to be complete operating systems, which I would agree with. Many of them shipped with tiny editors, block management systems, and multitaskers. It was one of the most interesting eras of computing.
I'm in agreement, but this line is not quite an accurate metaphor:

> e.g. if someone printed out NYT articles and sold them, nobody would come after the printer manufacturer.

If the printer manufacturer had a product that could take one sentence and it would print multiple pages that complete a news article from that sentence, ...
The difference is that search engines don’t destroy the incentive to do the value-added activity of “produce original content.”

To the extent they do do that, e.g. Google’s “Knowledge Graph” snippets that extract content onto the results page, they also tend to be under fire for those. At least those (attempt to?) cite the source.
Not sure where you're coming from in this. A NYT article, once written is copyrighted. Using the content without attribution is at best plagiarism, and spitting it out the way the LLMs do is definitely a violation of if that copyright.

Unless you're telling me ChatGPT has eyes and sources just like the NYT and is worrying events as it sees them too?
It also allows you to exit any interest group you don’t want to be in.

How about all interest groups?

But Google will likely still track you --- in case you should ever change your mind --- or in case one of their "associates" should offer to pay for access for purposes other than ads.

Hopefully, this can all be circumvented easily enough in 3rd party phone ROMs.
Is your point that the NYT should sue bloggers? Or that given the existence of bloggers, they should not try to sue Microsoft? Or something else?
This was a concern for me, that is why i've used Synergy over VPN and it worked quite well. It also works on networks where you can't reach the other pc's that way.
How much do we understand today about the physical cause of “Long Covid” and how covid causes it?

Is this an accumulation of lasting damage to assorted organs (including brain) and the direct and higher order effects of that? Or is there some ongoing infection to be combatted?
Okay. But ChatGPT doesn't spin out the fact in the same order right? So how does this stand in court?
All those blogs are _also_ violating copyright, so I don't see the irony? One doesn't spend a million dollars suing a defendant with pennies to their name.

I'd also expect the Times style complaint to have merit because it's probably much easier for ChatGPT to imitate the NYT style than an arbitrary style.
When talking about cults, I'd rather shift the description of the target demographic from "gullible" to "desperate" and "vulnerable". Many people don't get an upbringing that produces a self-sustained, emotionally mature adult, many are isolated, are riddled with overbearing negative feelings like loneliness and abandonment. Otherwise not necessarily gullible people are willing to look away if they get what they really want, and these negative feelings make one really want for example human connections, and a part in a structure.

I'm deliberately writing this in this abstract level, because it's not just cults who get their members like this. Extremists employ the same tactics, as does the military, many influencers, self-help as an industry, and even a lot of cheating in relationship happens for the same reason.

The takeaway, I think, is that these bad things happen to normal humans, same as everybody. And the second one is that it really pays off for the individual to look inside, so that nothing festers unchecked. Many of the funny things happen in the dark corner where we're not willing to look.
Ok, let’s address this from the standpoint of a node in the network of the thoughtscape. A denizen of the “inter”net, and also a victim of the exploitive nature of artists.

Media amalgamated power by farming the lives of “common” people for content, and attempt to use that content to manage lives of both the commons and unique, under the auspice of entertainmet. Which in and of itself is obviously a narrative convention which infers implied consent (id ask to what facetiously).

Keepsake of the gods if you will…

We are discussing these systems as though they are new (ai and the like, not the apple of iOS), they are not…

this is an obfuscation of the actual theft that’s been taking place (against us by us, not others).

There is something about reaping what you sow written down somewhere, just gotta find it.

-mic
Reading an article where you assume the author is biased is not so bad. What’s bad is finding an alternative source and reading it as if the author IS unbiased.
Google can look up into their index and can remove whatever they want to, within minutes. But how that can be possible for an LLM? That is, "decontaminate" the model from certain parts of the corups? I can only think of excluding the data set from the training and then retrain?

As a side note, I think LLM frenzy would be dead in few years, 10 years time frame at max. The rent seeking on these LLMs as of today would no more be a viable or as profitable business model as more inference circuitry gets out in the wild into laptops and phones, more models get released, tweaked by the community and such.

People thinking to downvote and dismiss this should see the history of commercial Unix and how that turned out to be today and how almost no workload (other than CAD, Graphics) runs on Windows or Unix including this very forum, I highly doubt is hosted on Windows or a commercial variant of Unix.
In the context of Shakespeare, I'd agree that there may be some competitive potential in the product. But in the context of news, something that evolves and relies on timely and accurate information, I don't see how something like that turns into competition for the NYT by being trained on past NYT outputs.

If the argument is that people can use ChatGPT to get old NYT content for free, that can be illustrated simply enough, but as another commenter pointed out, it doesn't really seem to be that simple.
"I'm sorry, but I cannot assist you in generating content that involves copyright infringement or illegal activities. If you have other questions or need assistance with a different topic, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help in any way I can."
Not usually. They might turn them into offices, but they also have been known to just sit on real estate.
New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for using articles to train AI
RDJ has to be up there
The vast majority of quality art and is produced by people who do it because they want to create art, not for money, and most artists earn little.
What's the actionable advice here? US regulation should be the lowest common denominator of all countries one considers in competition? Certainly Chinese and Russian LLMs could vacuum up all the information. China already cares little about copyright and trademark, should they stop being enforced in the US?

My opinion is that the US should do things that are consistent with their laws. I don't think a Chinese or Russian LLM is much of a concern in terms of this specific aspect, because if they want to operate in the US they still need to operate legally in the US.
>it doesn’t necessarily play “better”, depending on how you view the importance of the native controllers etc.

You can have the same graphics, same controllers, just better performance, if you so desire.

You can play with Joycons, or when playing with other controllers (like an Xbox controller), you can have the UI changed to match. I used a 360 controller and left the UI stock.

And you can just turn off Switch-specific quality drops that are used to improve performance on the Switch hardware (at least one of which actually drops performance in emulation, see "LOD Improvement" mod), and/or use better quality emulated versions for an experience that is effectively a theoretical "Switch Pro".

I think in this specific instance, better isn't really that subjective.
Interesting. I don't think I'm schizophrenic but I'll often "hear" in my head a good rhyme to what I'm saying that doesn't make sense in context but would sound neat so I'll say it - mostly in conversation with people I know very well - primarily to my wife.

It's not uncontrolled, but I do it without even thinking. In normal conversation I've got a part of my brain monitoring and thinking "no don't say that, you'll look weird"
The NY Times company has an analogue to the Apple media relations page: https://investors.nytco.com/news-and-events/press-releases/

In most respected media companies there is a really-important-to-journalists-who-work-there firewall between these sorts of corporate battles and the reporting on them.
https://archive.is/20231227143832/https://www.washingtonpost...
The style itself can’t really be copyrighted, but the expression of something using it can be, so you can use NYT’s style to the T in your Substack but you can’t copy their stuff which is expressed in their style.
On the other hand, you could also argue that if AI takes all financial incentives from professionals to produce original works, then the AI will lose out on quality material to train on and become worse. Unless your argument is there’s no need for anything else created by humanity, everything worth reading has already been written, and humanity has peaked and everyone should stop?

Like all things, it’s about finding a balance. American, or any other, AI isn’t free from the global system which exists around us— capitalism.
I don't understand. So if New York times reported on a new laws of physics and put as an article will became copyrighted? Nobody would be able to talk about it and has to discover it by themselves?

How is reporting on an event different from reporting on discovering a scientific law?
So the US should stop enforcing copyright or child labor laws because some other countries may not, giving them an economic advantage?
The word ‘moot’ does not mean what you think it means.
as far as I understodd ChatGPT reproduced a word-for-word part of an NYT article(?), but not sure, didnt read the full post yet.
Humans are not very smart, individually, and over a single lifetime. We become smart as a species in tens of millennia of gathering experience and sharing it through language.

What LLMs learn is exactly the diff between primitive humans and us. It's such a huge jump a human alone can't make it. If we were smarter we should have figured out the germ theory of disease sooner, as we were dying from infections.

So don't praise the learning abilities of little children, without language and social support they would not develop very much. We develop not just by our DNA and direct experiences but also by assimilating past experiences through language. It's a huge cache of crystallized intelligence from the past, without which we would not rule this planet.

That's also why I agree LLMs are stalling because we can't quickly scale a few more orders of magnitude the organic text inputs. So there must the a different way to learn, and that is by putting AI in contact with environments and letting it do its own actions and learn from its mistakes just like us.

I believe humans are "just" contextual language and action models. We apply language to understand, reason and direct our actions. We are GPTs with better feedback from outside, and optimized for surviving in this environment. That explains why we need so few samples to learn, the hard work has been done by many previous generations, brains are fit for their own culture.

So the path forward will imply creating synthetic data, and then somehow evaluating the good from the bad. This will be task specific. For coding, we can execute tests. For math, we can use theorem provers to validate. But for chemistry we need simulations or labs. For physics, we need the particle accelerator to get feedback. But for games - we can just use the score - that's super easy, and already led to super-human level players like AlphaZero.

Each topic has its own slowness and cost. It will be a slow grind ahead. And it can't be any other way, AI and AGI are not magic. They must use the scientific method to make progress just like us.
I'd rather see submissions from new accounts than from the accounts that regularly post 10-20 times every single day. As for a trend, only 3 out of the current top 90 posts are new accounts.
Hm... Why would people not just paste in sections of the book to the "raw" model in the playground (gpt instead of chatgpt) and just see if it completes the text correctly? Is the concern that chatgpt may have used the book for training data but not the original llm?
If they are determined to have broken the law then they should absolute be made to pay damages to aggrieved parties (now, determining if they did and who those parties are is an entirely unknown can of worms)
The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft for Copyright Infringement
What do you mean when you say "appropriation and privatization" of "all human output"?

The output is still there for anyone else to train on if they want.
Ah thank you. The examples start on page 30.

I wish they included the prompts they used, not just the output.

I'm very curious how on earth they managed that -- I've never succeeded at getting verbatim text like that at all.
Working enough that people and companies there exist, live, and are to some degree successful, yes. I've visited multiple times in the past few years and I found it to be pretty normal
What next, suing the school system for using NYT articles in English class to train children?
>the ship has sailed

Certainly, but debating the spirit behind copyright or even "how to regulate AI" (a vast topic, to put it mildly) is only one possible route these lawsuits could take.

I suspect that ultimately the winner is going to be business first (of course in the name of innovation), and the law second, and ethics coming last -- if Google can scan 129 million books [1] and store them without even a slap on the wrist [2], OpenAI and anyone of that size can most surely continue to do what they're doing. This lawsuit and others like it are just the drama of 'due process'.

[1] https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE9AD0TT/
You can get rid of it if you email HN, if you behave :-D
No you are just not a monodimensional individual.

240k buys you lots of free time to pursue your passions, if one is truly passionate about something they'd aim to engage ASAP and while at peak of mental and physical fitness. In the end money cannot buy time.

Even if you turn 240k into 240m in 20 years time you cannot buy 20 years of tennis practice or kitesurf abilities or skiing/motorcycle abilities or whatever you are passionate about.

Not to mention all the p*y you are leaving on the table by secluding yourself into an office for 20 years.
It's a price increase, probably due to inflation, which Amazon is benevolently not imposing upon consumers, who like ads, or don't care about ads.

I'll tell you what I am upset about though. Where's my one click buy button? That's an example of a degradation you couldn't pay your way out of. Amazon used to let me buy things with one click. Now it's three clicks. If I could pay to get that experience back, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But that's not even a choice I'm granted. The whole point of money is to give us choices. No point in raging against the system working as intended. If you truly cared, you'd be rallying support to bring one click back.
Here's the most important part (from NYT story on the lawsuit [1]):

In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...
Sorry for being dense, but what’s the difference between this and nested styles that just landed in every browser? I still scope my styles to a particular selector in either case.
I think this is an area that most journalists are ill-equipped to cover or understand, so you get a lot of confused reporting.
Will be interesting to see where this ends up.

If I scrape the NYT content, and then commercialize a service that lets users query that content through an API (occasionally returning verbatim extracts) without any agreement from or payment to the NYT, that would be illegal.

It's not obvious to me why putting an LLM in the middle of the process changes that.
You think "my prior" is jargon? I'm not sure what to say to you then. You realize Bayesian thinking in statistics has been around since the 1950s if not 1930s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics#Bayesian...
I find somehow ironic fact that site loads images from lh7-us.googleusercontent.com
Myanmar-based gangs force trafficking victims to scam Americans online
The Right to Repair movement won its biggest victories in 2023
Here’s another thought: It’s good that there are real incentives to produce original content. Especially investigative journalism which is an extremely tough business financially — even without LLMs — but with lots of social value.

It would be silly to totally destroy the incentive to produce new technologies like LLMs, but so wouldn’t it be silly to destroy the incentive to produce original, high-quality content either for human or LLM consumption.

FWIW the LLMs are obviously the ones rent-seeking here, if you’re trying to use the term for its actual meaning instead of just “charge a subscription for something I don’t want to pay for.”
Definitely then, go automatic. Better record than human pilots?