skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I’ve heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae,

Whenever the rationalist writers start talking about engineering, programming, or machine learning in technical terms I have a sudden Gell-Mann Amnesia realization that these people's primary domain is writing and pontificating, with little to no actual experience with engineering, programming, or machine learning.

I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world as being simply defined by "a few simple formulae"

Meanwhile, the rationalist community has an abnormally large reverence for engineers, programmers, and machine learning experts as if they were superhuman:

> But to these I’d add that a sufficiently smart engineer has never been burned by arguments above his skill level before,

Really? Sufficiently smart engineers have never encountered arguments above their skill level? Are we to assume that engineers are at the peak of logic and reasoning and skill? Is this an attempt to pander to an engineering audience? Or an actual belief that engineers have superhuman levels of logic?

Finally, I'm growing tired of the way rationalist writings go out of their way to self-congratulate rationalists while placing the rest of the population into the unenlightened normie category that we're all supposed to look down upon:

> The people I know who are best at taking ideas seriously are those who are smartest and most rational
For those that do not know: Flamanville 3. Commercial introduction delayed from 2012 to hopefully 2024. Current cost estimate is five times the original budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
This is necessarily a value judgment, isn't it? There are tools like lifecycle analyses and environmental impact reports and threatened species lists that can help estimate/enumerate impacts. But ultimately how much to care is a personal question, and people are going to disagree over whether some small fish or rare owl or fluffy panda is worth more or less than someone's job or a local industry or just some other charismatic species.

Species will always come and go, and they're going to die off faster than we can protect them, sadly. We only get to decide which ones to prioritize, at different personal, local, national, global levels etc.
it was all better when we were living in caves, didn't have most of our current problems; we lost our simple life too long ago
Just charge people for the natural resources of the country via taxes. Resource and land taxes solve basically every single problem in the current American economy yet people do not want to even think about doing it.
> bull market will return

Return? It's been 'line only ever goes up' since November.
The past is a different country.

In the 1980s, it was indeed very strange to do that, especially in the official names of songs and albums. It was something kids or the illiterate did. It was embarrassing for an adult to use 4 for 'for' in anything important, even art. Today, that is not strange at all, it is common slang.

Prince is one of the reasons why we don't see that as strange today. He was one of the first to (re)introduce doing that on purpose in a major work of popular culture.
Hobbes called it. Fully coming to terms with the downstream implications of this assessment, which Hobbes also did, is less palatable.
That's fair, not having a cookie could work for session, how would you handle CSRF protection on a login form without cookies?
>physically abled home owner

I think you nailed part of the problem here. For no less that 30% of the population the first step in the googles would be. Wear googles and go to gym for at least 6 months, along with diet guidance. "You are about to eat a snickers bar, this will delay your air conditioner repair by 16hrs"

I once tried to show a white collar friend how to spray for bugs himself, he needed a break after hand pumping the chemical sprayer. Im pretty sure in the end he just paid someone anyway.
> imagine living with that 12 hours a day

Given the video clearly depicts sunset, that is indeed an imaginary problem.
You can cringe all you want but "Will I be proud of the work I do here?" and "Do I think the work I do is a net benefit or drain to the world?" are pretty damn low bars for screening potential employers.

You have to really try to put in 40 hours of work a week and create negative value but by god they seem like they're best in class.
Yes, I've used it in a commercial product with 10000+ deployments. It was the only chip with BLE and WiFi, so there was no other option at the time. If the requirements were different, I would use something from Nordic Semiconductors [0] or some ARMv8 chip.

The hardware itself is fine, but the biggest pain was getting stable WiFi and BLE connections simultaneously, because of only one antenna/radio. RAM was also a problem, it would be great to have at least 512kb. The SDK from Espressif is sometimes a little bit weird, but usable and bugs are fixed quickly. The build system is ok, nothing special.

[0] https://www.nordicsemi.com/
wow $1/GB?

would be cheaper to pay a developer to add websocket support to openssh
Thanks for the link, it seems fascinating!
I am unsure if Palantir has other clients who have cases in from of the International Court of Justice on accusations of genocide - it has a lot of coverage right now. Here is a summary article from CNN:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/09/middleeast/israel-genocide-ca...

Does Palantir sell to Myanmar?

If Israel actually gets convicted of breaches under the convention, of which there is a chance, would you be comfortable selling technology that is aiding in their "war-related missions"?
>> The market is expecting the Fed to start cutting interest rates...

However:

> Just about every time the Fed started CUTTING rates dating back to 1950, the unemployment rate has spiked.

[1] pic.twitter.com/DChSRJJdD7
Alive, kicking, and actually supported by some decent cooling.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
It has supposedly been coming for the last 20 years reality is the cat is out of the bag and it won't be stuffed back in.

Even at today levels of AI a very large amount of work can be optimized if the domain experts knew how to use the ai tools. As people become more used to using them I don't see an ai winter coming.
Specifically, have there been cases of prosecution for those who hire the services? All of the links given so far appear to be for operators.
I cannot reproduce this, but I don't doubt it happens for other users. Guess I am in the lucky bucket. Maybe Firefox users get an older version without some new "improvements". :)

Edit: Nevermind, it happens to me as well, I just never noticed.
> I'm not sure if it was a bug or someone remotely changed the account records for her branch...

From https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/09/how-the-post...:

> One [bug]...would see the screen freeze as the user was attempting to confirm receipt of cash. Each time the user pressed “enter” on the frozen screen, it would silently update the record. In Dalmellington, that bug created a £24,000 discrepancy, which the Post Office tried to hold the post office operator responsible for.

The fact that this is even possible, apart from the sheer incompetency of a software design that permits it, means that no person can reasonably be accused of stealing cash if that accusation is based on records from this system.
Quite the opposite. I bike the kids to school every morning. The weather is too important to be summed up by a voice summary, I need the hour by hour details.
You'd HATE me then =D.

I live in a one-party consent state. And, Apple Watches have a GREAT and discreet microphone; I record whenever I have the slightest feeling something "important" is going to be said.

(And from a technical POV, using OpenAIs Whisper I can very easily convert those recordings to searchable transcripts)

You want to be a little HR god of your fiefdom. Still, unsurprisingly, intelligent people don't like people above them going on power trips, especially in America, where employers have a one-sided power-relationship with workers.
Articles talking about the reproducibility crisis focus on soft science where it is more likely to occur but there is at least one major hard science (physics) reproducibility crisis:

We are unable to reproduce measurements of the Gravitational constant.

Reproducibility - distinct from the claimed uncertainty by the experiments - has not advanced at all since the 1940's. This is unlike any other physical constant where precision and reproducibility has consistently progressed along with our technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_constant

> Published values of G derived from high-precision measurements since the 1950s have remained compatible with Heyl (1930), but within the relative uncertainty of about 0.1% (or 1,000 ppm) have varied rather broadly, and it is not entirely clear if the uncertainty has been reduced at all since the 1942 measurement. Some measurements published in the 1980s to 2000s were, in fact, mutually exclusive.[7][30] Establishing a standard value for G with a standard uncertainty better than 0.1% has therefore remained rather speculative.
The March rate cuts are not guaranteed. The markets can stay irrational longer than you (the companies in question) can remain solvent.
I think because I have Google Fi, I kept getting Google Home products. We've got a couple of the little speakers, and a couple of the little Nest hubs. I bought a pair of Nest Home Max speakers when they were blowing them out, because people said they sounded good - they do!

All this is to say I'm fairly late to the voice assistant party. At some point my wife and I decided to give it a good try. Read up on best practices. Figured it'd been something that had been in market a good long time, maybe by now the kinks were worked out.

The search results were hit or miss. It was not clear where tasks were being saved to.

So for the last few years, here are the voice commands we've used:

ok google, what's the weather today

ok google, play white noise

ok google, stop

...and every now and then, we ask it to search for info on a topic and it fails comically. I'm not surprised to see a big shift here.

Oooh. On my Pixel, I do use "OK Google, Turn off the flashlight" - that IS helpful.
> ... you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.

While that's true, it does sound like her direct manager was outright misleading her.

Telling someone they're doing well when they're very much not (to the point their job is at risk) isn't constructive, and doesn't help anyone.

Well, not unless the manager was purposely sabotaging the employee for some reason.

It's more likely the manager is just an idiot though, and tells everyone they're doing great regardless of the reality.

Seen that before :( though I have no idea if that's the case here.
> Oh boy, an opportunity to flex my AgSci degree oh HN! The invention of the HB process is more akin to a planetary credit card loan. It has done absolutely nothing to increase the Earth's genuine carrying capacity and (IMO) trapped humanity in insurmountable ecological debt.... Without it billions will starve, but with it we continue to charge towards a mass-extinction event.

It's worth noting that process is one of the technologies that techno-optimists like to cite to shout down skeptics of their belief we humans will always techno-magick ourselves out of every problem. We will until we can't, and a couple generations after being proven wrong by famine and extinctions, the techno-optimists will resume their chant.
Although financo/algo-trading is math heavy, it does not fall into the category of scientific computing.

Just as you haven't experienced Fortran, there are several areas in science that have not experienced C++/Python, and rely on Fortran.
Well they switched that philosophy with the MAX and look what happened...
maybe it's useful for fine-tuning jobs, not for free prompting

I have had a similar bad experience with it trying to prompt it
I know he inputs some numbers, but I am just supremely skeptical of them. If solar + batteries + RO plants could produce water at a price that made agriculture economically viable, then I just don't see how it wouldn't already be happening. Or at the very least be being proposed more broadly than some random guys blog.

If I understand correctly, it is his plan for extracting value from the brine which represents the biggest unknown/the most need for development, while also being the thing that makes it all make sense. I've never heard of any of the existing worlds desal plants doing this, so either it must be harder than he supposes or else he must think that every single person in charge of a desal plant the world over is an idiot.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that sometimes people miss obvious things. And sometimes, there really is a $100 bill on the ground, despite what the apocryphal economist would have you believe.

But in this case, areas like that are what I need to be convinced of. While it's maybe true, you don't just get to assert it.

As they say "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".
Not sure. I just found myself noticing the scroll-position loss repeatedly over a few weeks of browsing Twitter, and figured I didn't have to wait for an official fix.
Or they could just buy other EVs that don't have this problem. Teslas are overrated and Hertz just fell for it.
I think at some level for certain topics and areas there is a minimal level of knowledge and information you need to know in order to evaluate or even understand advanced arguments about the topic. In a sense you won't become closer to the truth until you reach that minimum level of understanding and before that you will just ping pong between positions without a real understanding of whether you are correct or not.

Many arguments especially advanced ones are building on a presumed level of knowledge that many people do not have or are even aware that they should have. Doing the work to adequately evaluate an argument in every domain is probably not worth their time.
There is a balance between immersive and ambient. A large number of people are working on the latter in terms of smart home devices, advanced driver assistance systems and fitbit-like quantified self devices, to name a couple of sectors.

Maybe a challenge for ambient technology is that its nature is non-engaging. If it were engaging, it would be immersive and not ambient.
Japan launches satellite to monitor N Korean military sites
Headline: "AI Winter shouted from the rooftops for the millionth time this year, meanwhile for the weather showing balmy 85 degree temperatures for the next few years"
Do you know if they use Rolls Royce engines?
> What makes the pleb filter such an entertaining addition to online Discourse is that it's a ready-made kafkatrap, a perfect concept for trolls and shitposters to weaponize

> The pleb filter is not just a fun tool for trolling, it also offers a great opportunity to show off one's smarts.

> It is genuinely challenging to truly appreciate the talent and artistry that goes into bullshit—Armond White (perhaps the greatest bullshitter of our time) is himself a pleb filter, perhaps the ultimate one. Some are liable to react with horror, but I think it's a game worth indulging in.

So I think the author is studying trolling and having bad taste as a game, essentially. I think it is not really very difficult or interesting to come up with winning strategies for a game that everyone else is not interested in or even aware they are playing.
I can read a novel idea, get excited by it, remember it and return to it later without being convinced.
I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of close reading.

I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with quantum mechanics and I just need you to add the math". But I can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.
You do know you can do what you like outside of work, right?

You have a hyper-idealized version of what is and is not art.

And execution definitely forms part of the talent. We should know that just as well. We all know "the idea guy", the guy who has all the "right" ideas, but just can't seem to actually do the thing required to bring the idea to life.

And that's because most ideas are just half-formed thoughts. I'm almost on the other end of the spectrum. It's mostly about execution and the idea actually means very little. The idea of "what if you couldn't make new memories" is the central struggle in two very different movies. In Memento, it's used to tell a detective noir story where we're told who the killer is in the first scene. In 50 First Dates, it's used to give Adam Sandler a hurdle to plowing Drew Barrymore.

And you can find joy in the doing itself. You can make good commercial art. It is possible. There is craft there. And where there is craft, there is art.
> Lobbyist are not in power, our elected officials are.

I don't think I'd agree with that statement at all. Ostensibly our elected officials are in power but in reality it sure doesn't seem that way (with a handful of exceptions). You can't pump all that money into politics and expect it to have no effect. And while "most money spent" != "won election" it sure helps a lot, as in you need money to run a successful campaign so you are going to be beholden to someone. Even purest of heart are going to be at least slightly biased and I seriously doubt I'd consider the majority of elected officials to fall into the category of "people with pure hearts". The incentives are just not there to set ourselves up for success.
Yeah you are right. It is more like https://bs.parity.io/#/-BananaSplit-shamir
I'm in the UK so that kind of compensation package is completely unheard of. In London it's still feasible to pull in 100k+ without running the gauntlet.
> But please, enlighten me how an average modern desktop computer user could install a free media codec pack on a user friendly distro without opening the terminal?

Do you need to? I thought Ubuntu shipped codecs by default these days. But if it's an extra package, I was pretty sure Ubuntu shipped a GUI frontend to package management these days, and if that's not good enough you can use it to install synaptic and do whatever you need[0][1].

> but holy shit am repeatedly stunned by how average-user hostile linux is. They just refuse to stop speaking Klingon except for the most absolute basic things.

To marginally overextend the metaphor, you speak English (which is a terrible mess of a language[2], but it's familiar to you), immigrated into the Klingon Empire, appear to understand that Klingon is actually a more efficient language, and still want the Klingons to stop speaking Klingon and convert to using English, because you want it to be easier to flee the Terran Empire[3] if they did even though most people won't do so regardless.

[0] https://itsfoss.com/synaptic-package-manager/

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/addremove-install...

[2] I say this as a native speaker: English is a horrible mess of a language, mostly because it started as 3 other languages in a trench coat and never stopped tacking on bits and pieces of other languages.

[3] Okay, the metaphor is way more than marginally overextended, but it's not like people would flee the Federation...
By the end, it reads more like a virtuous justfication why his game graphics are so basic.

I also do not buy the core argument. The game industry tends to ask for more and pay less exactly because people romanticize it. That is not to say the most talented engineers do not end up hired to produce bullshit, just that it probably is not games.

Lastly, the desire for faster and more realistic graphics is what commoditized massively parallel computer architectures. Keep chasing those FPS, the future of humanity depends on it!
Hard Truths
Hundreds of civilizations have failed in human history, yet we are still here and the general curve is upward as it has been since the first self-replicating cells were born on Earth.

The Fermi Paradox explodes into a massive tree of possibilities. The truth is we just don't know. We haven't been looking very long or very far, and space is called space for a reason.

Space could be "full" of complex intelligent life, but the definition of "full" for space could be an overall average of one intelligent artifact per cubic light year per million years. We haven't looked around enough to have any chance of spotting that.

Radio SETI is kind of a joke; radiation diminishes with the square of distance so for us to detect a signal from another star it would have to be both intentionally beamed in our direction and incredibly powerful. They'd have to be screaming at us. Anything less than megawatts melts into cosmic microwave background before it reaches even the Centauri system, and anything with complex modulation just sounds like noise anyway.

Long range detection of technosignatures is riddled with assumptions around what to look for. Dyson swarms? If you tame fusion you don't need a Dyson swarm. Megastructures? Those are fragile and unwieldy and lots of small objects might be better. Powerful propulsion systems on spacecraft? It would have to be aimed right at us. Etc.

XKCD has the best Fermi paradox take:

https://xkcd.com/638/
Using cookies or other client-side storage for a shopping cart doesn't require a cookie banner as long as you're careful to use the minimum practical duration. See section 2.3 of https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinio...

If you want to persist the cart for longer than the current session or a few hours, though, you need consent.
Very cool, Thanks!
Still too much of some vague/futile ideology, try stretching instead.
Linked investment account counts. You just need $2500 in a checking account, the rest can be in whatever ETF or stock you'd like.
Tainted Love by Broken Peach.
Once a company reaches a certain size, all products used like Cloudflare go through a sales process to negotiate terms, SLA, compliance etc.
Not yet (in development), but there are literally 10's of millions of these powering common commercialized devices at this point.

I have several controllable LED light bulbs that are all ESP-based, bought on Amazon. Lot's of sensors, and general business and consumer oriented stuff using ESP8266 and ESP32 chips.
Android indeed, or anything that's not Apple nor Amazon nor some other "all your data are belong to us".

I know there are some cool DIY hacker projects out there, maybe I should really get my hands dirty tbh? In that case, does anyone know any good links to things they tried recently? Especially with Whisper.cpp and so on it may not be TOO hard on a Raspberry Pi... right?
Can you explain what you mean by desperate?

Poor severance packages and few opportunities?
Cool! I'll send them to you then :-)
> yet people do not want to even think about doing it.

probably because placing a price on some things seems too transactional. Not saying you're wrong, though. Just saying that's why. The alternative is allowing more rapacious disregard for the aggregate negative effects on everyone as a whole.
Palantir is a glorified IT consultant with some good political connections. What someone like Accenture or Infosys will do for your company, Palantir will do for a country's military, only their bill will have a few more zeroes at the end. They are still ultimately setting up databases for supply chain management and HR. The rest of what you see ("AI on the battlefield!") is all marketing.
Absolutely not true. Cloudflare did this because they didnt want to pay severance or even unemployment to Brittany.