skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You made an analogy between AI x-risk and e.g. cold fusion. I pointed out that there's an important disanalogy here: no one is claiming or has claimed that cold fusion poses an existential threat. Hence, the nearest cold-fusion claim to any AI x-risk claims is "cold fusion is worth investigating" (which it was, once, and isn't now).

It looks to me as if (1) you made an analogy that doesn't really work, then (2) when I pointed out how it doesn't work, (3) you said "look, you're making an analogy that doesn't really work". That doesn't seem very fair.

I wouldn't expect hell itself to have physical-world evidence. But the idea of hell doesn't turn up as an isolated thing, it comes as part of a package that also says e.g. that the world is under the constant supervision of an all-powerful, supremely good being, and that I would expect to have physical-world evidence.

I have no problem with the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The difficult thing is deciding which claims count as "extraordinary". A lot of theists would say that atheism is the extraordinary claim, on the grounds that until recently almost everyone believed in a god or gods. (I'm not sure that's actually quite true, but it might be true for e.g. "Western" societies.) I don't agree and I take it you don't either, but once the question's raised you actually have to look at the various claims being made and how plausible they are: you can't just say "look, obviously this claim is extraordinary and that claim isn't".

Advocates of AI x-risk might say: it's not an extraordinary claim that AI systems will keep getting more powerful -- they're doing that right now and it's not at all uncommon for technological progress to continue for a while. And it's not an extraordinary claim that they'll get smarter than us along whatever axis you choose to measure -- that's a thing that's happened over and over again in particular domains. And it's not an extraordinary claim that something smarter than us might pose a big threat to our well-being or even our existence; look at what we've done to everything else on the planet.

You, on the other hand, would presumably say that actually some or all of those are extraordinary claims. Or perhaps that their conjunction is extraordinary even if the individual conjuncts aren't so bad.

Unfortunately, "extraordinary" isn't a term with a precise definition that we know how to check objectively. It's a shorthand for something like "highly improbable given the other things we know" or "highly implausible given the other things we know", and if someone doesn't agree with you that something is an "extraordinary" claim I don't know of any way to convince them that doesn't involve actually engaging with it.

(Of course you might not care whether you convince them. If all you want to do is to encourage other people who think AI x-risk is nonsense, saying "extraordinary claim" and "burden of proof" and so on may be plenty sufficient.)
>What would you buy? $10 H&M or $100 hand-made shirt? - (My guess, if you could afford the later.)

This is an interesting example because even in the $100 case you are still talking about machine-augmentation. You can have a seamstress or a tailor customize patterns, using off the shelf textiles, for that order of magnitude price - but if you want to use custom built, exotic materials or many kinds combined, the cost is on the orders of thousands not hundreds. Also there is a large industry of just printing designs on stock-shirts, that has a different point effort-scale equilibria.

Thinking about how how automation disintermediates is very important. For animation, often productions have key-frame artists in the animation pipeline that define scenes, and then others that take though to flush out all the details of that scene. GenAI can potentially automate that process. You could still have the artist producing a keyframe, and can render that into a video.

Another big factor is style. One hypothesized reason that more impressionism, absurdism or abstract art all become styles is photography. Once cheap machine-produced photography became available, there is less need for a portrait artist. But further, it also is no longer high-status and others push trends alternative directions.

All the experiments and innovation going right now will definitely settle into a different set of roles for artists, and trends that they will seek to satisfy. Art-style itself will change as a result of both what is technically possible and also what is _not_ easily automatable in order to gain prestige.
Humans usually add their own style to things, and it’s hard to discuss copyright without that larger context along with the question of scale (me making copies of your paintings by hand is not as significant a risk to your livelihood as being able to make them unimaginably faster than you can at much lower cost). Just as rules about making images of people in certain ways or places only became critical when photography made image reproduction an industrial-scale process, I think we’ll be seeing updates to fair-use rules based on scale and originality.
It's the default.

Isn't putting your private keys on the internet the thing we're trying to avoid?
Or the not-so-fun version of that, finding the question I posted on Stack Overflow years ago with zero answers. :cry:
I think there is a case to be made when AI models do produce copies. For instance, I think the NYT have a right to have an issue with the near verbatim recall of NYT articles. It's not clear cut though, when these models produce copies, they are not functioning as intended. Legally that might produce a quagmire, is it fair use when you intend to be transformative but by accident it isn't? Does it matter if you have no control over which bits are not transformative? Does it matter if you know in advance that some bits will be non transformative but you don't know which ones.

I presume there are people working on research relating to how to prevent output of raw training data, what is the state of the art in this area? Would it be sufficient to prevent output of the training data or should the models be required to have no significant internal copies of training examples?
No, but as soon as you want to use anything like standard containers, you need to box them.
Agreed. Pascal made it simple to understand fast and I was in productive flow.

Then suddenly I realized there are stuff I cannot do with it. That was the last day I used Pascal - and I remember it like my dearest experience in programming!
Google translate is very basic and not even close to something good if you already know both languages. Useful if you're translating to your language (you do the correction when reading), but can lead to confusion the other way.
Not all transactions are grifts, because frequently something for sale will have different values to the buyer and seller. Things aren't strictly worth what you can sell them for, unless the only thing you want to do with the thing is to sell it.
As an aside, many full service banks can exchange foreign currency for you. For example, Bank of America does (https://www.bankofamerica.com/foreign-exchange/exchange-rate...). You can also order foreign currency prior to your trip and they'll mail it to you.
It started as internal MongoDb format, so it has a different history and context. But today comparison might be interesting.
That is a fictional character in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Moreover, the action of the novel is in WWII, many years after the public disclosure of the one-time pad by Vernam, which happened in 1926.

While the novel Cryptonomicon uses the term "one-time pad", it is very likely that this is an anachronism, because I have not seen any document from WWII or earlier that uses this term. The classified manuals of Military Cryptography and Military Cryptanalysis written by Friedman described it without using a special term for it, while Shannon, in 1945 and 1949 called it the "Vernam system", quoting the only non-classified source for it, i.e. the paper written by Vernam. I believe that the term "one-time pad" might have been coined during the Cold War to describe the ciphers used by Russian spies, who used random keys written on sheets of paper, which were destroyed after use. So in the beginning it was not a term referring to ciphers implemented by machines.

Before the classified work of Friedman from 1918, who cryptanalyzed documents intercepted in France in the final months of WWI, there was a certain Frank Miller who has described a kind of one-time pad in 1882.

However, what Frank Miller has written did not have any influence on cryptology. Moreover, his choice appears to have been just a lucky guess, which was not based on any experience in breaking ciphers or on any mathematical theory.
Generally the people who deride others for pseudoscience are most often the real pseudoscientists. Almost always. Take this article, for example, claiming that selenium, reishi, cordyceps, colloidal silver, chaga, ashwagandha are all "pseudoscientific wellness products" suggests to me the author is ignorant and hasn't actually reviewed the scientific literature on these products. Clearly has an axe to grind.
> I've never paid Microsoft for an OS that showed me ads against my will in my Start Menu

Sadly, a lot of us have. Most laptops and assembled PCs you buy come bundled with windows and you can’t return it for a refund even if the first thing you do is ripping it out and installing a better FOSS OS. You’ve still paid MS for their dumpster fire of an OS you didn’t even want.
I feel like the issue here, is you are giving AIs agency.

AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself.

Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human flooding the market using a printing press?

Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing? The human endeavor is not meant to be a make work project. Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
We had a short thread on LLPSI 7 months ago, so I can't just post it directly, but I just learned about this and it is blowing the roof of my brain off and wanted to share it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213

This book teaches Latin, but strictly from example source code. It just drops you in and like a minute later you're reading a paragraph in Latin. It's mindbending.

(I've got 4 years of Jesuit school Latin, but when I told the Latin scholar on our team that all I remembered was "nauta sumus", he had to correct me "nautae sumus", so I don't even have that. I don't think any previous Latin matters here, which is what makes this approach so cool).

This is one of the HN-iest books I've ever seen.
I learned French as an adult, and I cannot at all hear the difference between the words "rue" and "roue." People tell me there's a difference and they try to sound it out to me, but each time they do, I just have to trust that they aren't saying the same thing twice.
The transition to Python 3 took a very long time. I often wonder if they would have saved themselves a ton of grief if they had done it quicker.
Selling poison is illegal.
huge gains to be had in that gram of overpriced nuts, surely
I simply add the word forum to most of my Google searches.
I agree. High performers should be recognized via whatever process the company has to do so. Leveling, at reviews, etc. The lack of doing that is just shitty management. It doesn't change the basic description of the market above.
> Was also looking into pressure washing.

Why not both?

As pressure washing is necessary before painting a house. You can offer both services and just add to your customer base. I'm rethinking my life now and wondering if I should start it up again as well, lol.
See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014985#39017792
There is none. That's my point. Both storefronts get many of their same ingredients from the same suppliers.

But for Alex Jones' audience that would be exactly the kind of mild, uninteresting connection they would run wild with.
:shudder: It's the next generation of Rickrolling.
The much more likely scenario is that there is a precedent-setting court case. This is how it happened with practically every other instance of copyright bumping into technology.
But... what about humans???
Think of it more in terms of military power + trigger happiness and less in terms of ideology (good guys and bad guys). Then it might become clearer to you.
You can draw parallel with many things, ie. student who is learning on copyrighted work in a library.
Kinda like how HP will make your printer work again if you simply buy and install approved ink?
Validating my idea for a possible SaaS, QrMe
Well, in the last few days I had an idea inspired by Pieter Levels' project, QrMenu, where you use Markdown to create a restaurant menu and share a QrCode of it. I thought, what if I just did this for a personal business card?

Well, that's exactly the idea, you could create a business card using Markdown and share your qrcode.
The features I thought of were: profile photo + wallpaper, Spotify integration (like Instagram for music, and this would be for premium payers), enhance, summarize, generate files and resumes based on profile using AI (this would be premium too , and yes, there has to be AI in some form hahahah)

It was a spontaneous idea and I thought it was interesting, but I don't know if anyone would pay for it.

It would be a simple way to share your information legally.

What do you think of the idea? would there be users? and most importantly, of course, would anyone pay for it?

Give me feedback and ideas to improve this if needed.

Ah, I thought of a slogan perhaps: "Make me a Qrcode"

Thanks!
Yeah, I think you're right that a big chunk of this is vibes-based in-group signalling. One doesn't usually wind up far out on the political poles if one's generally happy with the decisions and worldview of the experts/authorities.
I have like 2 or 3 physical keys. I have accounts on hundreds of websites. Sure, you can use the same key on every website but you better not lose it. So now you need to register multiple keys on every website. Also if you lose one you need to go back to every single site and add your replacement. (I hope you remember every site you have signed into.)

So "not copyable" is actually a huge downside for convenience. Such a downside that even though I have a collection of U2F keys I only use them in a handful of accounts. The maintenance cost is just far too high.

To resolve this you would probably need something like cross-signing. So I can say "I know that you only trust key A, but I lost it a few years ago. However I have an attestation from key A saying that key B is mine as well. Here is a signature from key B". However this is effectively equivalent to copying keys. So it basically defeats that point.
> Huh, memorising songs is interesting, how do you do this? Split it into a set of cards per verse where each card in the set is of a different line hidden?

I'm trying to find the best way to do this in 2024. What I used to do is use a plugin called "Cloze Overlapper", which helps generate these automatically - you give it all the lines, and it creates cards where you get one line before, and need to guess the next line. Unfortunately this plugin is behind a paywall or something, unclear if it still works.

There are alternatives today, a popular one is something like Lyrics Cloze Generator, which does something similar but ends up working a bit worse IMO.

Btw, I use this both to memorize songs I randomly feel like learning, but also to memorize songs in another language, as a way of learning more vocab in a fun way. Not sure if it's optimal but I figure I might as well, if it's a song I want to learn anyway.
Fair use applies to humans and the things they do (including AI). It is not something that applies to algorithms in themselves. AI's are not people, the people who use them are people and fair use may or may not apply to the things they do depending on the circumstances of whatever it is they do. The agent is always the human not the machine.
Well for one, security keys have arbitrary limits. The latest yubikey can store up to 25 FIDO2 credentials for password-free logins, two OTP credentials, 32 OATH credentials for one-time passwords (when paired with the Yubico Authenticator), and an unlimited number of U2F credentials [1].

[1] https://support.yubico.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016649339-Yu...
Don't look at the top .1%. Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people who are "self made". They didn't inherit. Even in the top .1% you find the likes of Bill Gates who started out pretty average (there is a lot of luck in his story or course)
Maybe don't use Blake3 on Short Inputs
At least for me, all it took to discover an intolerance to certain yeasts was visiting a tasting room for yeasts (https://www.whitelabs.com/) and sniffing a beer containing the specific type of yeast (Note: all the beers I was tasting were variating just the brewing yeast).

The reaction caused a massive nasal congestion and a runny nose that essentially ended my ability to taste or enjoy further tastings for the day.

I've also seen this reaction occur across very similar beers: Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier non-organic is totally fine, but the organic one will cause the nasal reaction.
You can't make everybody happy at the same time.
this math adds up only until tried
Yes there is. Marx views wages and conditions under capitalism as a race to the bottom that will only go down.
They are not labeled clearly, IMO. Oscillococcinum is labeled with “flu-like symptoms” “body aches, headache, fever, chills, fatigue” “medicine” and “works naturally with your body”.

These fall on a spectrum between misleading and outright lies. While “fever” may be seen as an only misleading label (the label doesn’t say that it treats fever in any way, so you could make that argument), there are some outright falsehoods on that box.

“Works naturally with your body” is an outright falsehood. It would have to work, in order to work naturally with your body.

“Medicine” is another outright falsehood.

The shit should be regulated into oblivion.
Copying is not illegal, but publishing. You can have as many private copies as you wish for any content.
Nobody cares what you think you sound like in the shower. Nobody

If I can make a voice over that sounds like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, why would I pay him to make the voice over for me? If I can make artwork in the style of X why would I commission X to make that artwork instead? Nobody cares if it actually was made by them as long as people think it was made by them. So "them" gets screwed because nobody will use them. We're obviously talking in very strict ones and zeros here with "nobody". Except for the nobody caring what you think you sound like
> There is nothing that can be done short of terminating the global internet. Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. You can't ban it everywhere. You can't ban open source.

Ah yes, the Nirvana Falacy. [0]

Microsoft, Google, etc are corporations that operate within a legal framework. You can quite readily claw back some of their profits from such ill-gotten gains and redistribute them to the creators who they currently intend to put out of work.

"Oh, but some pirate will do it! Oh, but China will do it! So why not let those poor megacorporations do it, too!"

So what. The megaorporations who nominally answer to and respect the rule of law are the lion's share of this problem. They can be made to stop. Solve them and you're 90% there, don't get bogged down in the other 10%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
People just want to feel good about themselves, and mocking infowars (etc.) is a easy way to assert their superiority.
NetBSD can just trim the kernel down to Virtio support and not much more.
Imagine how rich you would be if you were the first artist to make a red health bar in a video game.
Well, I tried it, and MJ gets thrown off by the name of the style being two generic words "cat and girl." It basically thinks you want a cat and a girl. I tried lots of variations and prompt options and I was giving too many hints.

Lesson being: give yourself a name as an artist that cannot be used easily in an AI prompt.

I think some musicians did this with artist names and track names that meant they couldn't easily be represented as MP3s, but could easily be printed on the tracklisting on the CD inlay.
> common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on

The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations.

I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.
I am really bummed by this. It's the best way to send alcohol across state lines (i.e. gifts for clients).
At the least, we need a Creative Commons license for ML: if you train on my data, your model must be public and permit remixing.

And I am in favor of more stringent licenses than that: you must pay me to use my data.
"For all practical purposes, Israel occupies Gaza; it is required to keep Gazan civilians supplied, If Israel wanted Gaza to be self-sufficient, it could allow them to build an airport, to receive ships on its shorefront, and to manage its own border with Egypt"

This is besides the point. Israel did not stop Hamas, which is the governing authority in Gaza, from investing in water infrastructure. Hamas chose to invest in underground tunnels instead. That is tragic, but it's not the responsibility of Israel. Israel did not control what happened inside Gaza and blockade did not prevent Hamas from importing cement and other materials for tunnel building, this is because civilian imports were allowed, but Hamas used imports earmarked for civilian use to build tunnels and rockets.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/us/politics/israel-gaza-t...