skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a well supported theory, but fascinating. Possibly an epigenetic influence? Much more likely a cultural effect, if any, that nudged early humans down the path of spiritual pursuit as a sort of cultural glue. The more spiritually inclined you were, the more likely you were to thrive in the societal hierarchy.

Use of psychedelics could have helped accelerate an individual's "spiritual" development and therefore afforded them additional offspring. So the correlation, if any, might be a favoring of genes that paired well with the effects of psychedelics. Pure speculation on my part.

As for AI, it seems highly likely a new class of designer drugs will emerge, tailored to a specific individual to enhance societal adaptation. We've already seen this in play over the past 40+ years in the pharmaceutical industry. AI will only accelerate it IMO.
Which I think was part of what my psychologist and psychiatrist's point was – in spite of my various issues, I somehow manage to have a job that pays well, a wife and two kids, cars, property, investments... I wouldn't be eligible for any government-provided support (nor should I be), no matter what pieces of paper I might purchase. Someone else who doesn't have those things, such a piece of paper can have some real practical benefits for them (irrespective of whether the piece of paper is an "accurate" or "correct" diagnosis)

> I think self-diagnosis is fine for people who don't require support.

This is what I don't agree with. I associate "self-diagnosis" with over-reification of ASD, which is a pet peeve of mine – emphasising categorical over dimensional understandings, ignorance of the doubts over ASD's validity as a scientific theory, ignorance of the evidence that it is (partially) socially constructed. And that's hardly a point unique to ASD, it applies to all psychiatric diagnoses – yet, many people seem to "identify with" ASD as their "true self" to a degree that rarely seen with other disorders – how many people identity with BPD or schizoaffective disorder or dysthymia in that way? And I don't like that identification. Whatever diagnoses I may or may not have, they are not me – and I don't want my children growing up identifying with their diagnoses either.
> Like saying that Phones cannot play youtube videos in background.

And that's such an odd thing to pin on the browser, too. Google intentionally makes it difficult to play YouTube videos in the background; that's a perk they reserve for paying YouTube Premium users.
I think this was just a year or two before Dennis Ritchie created C
>But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays.

Most successful founders, from Edison to Gates and Bezos went in the business to make money, not to change the world. Changing the world for better or for worse is mostly a side effect.

The goal of a business is profit, not ideology.
> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets.

If you go public, no way to prevent it.

You have to stay private. But if you took a lot of VC money (and gave them board positions) that's going to be difficult.
There are more options that can be much faster and convenient from which I would recommend lawn sweepers and mower bagging kits. There are also leaf vacuums but those work better vacuuming leaf piles.

There are push behind lawn sweepers for smaller areas, and tow behind sweepers that you can attach to a lawn tractor or mower.

On leveled ground, a lawn sweeper is faster than a leaf blower, and will pick up twigs, acorns as well as leaves.

In any case... lawn robots are coming strong and it's going to be a lawn robot game soon.
No. It is only relatively recently (~5/6 years) AWS have had any data centres in the UK.

That blocked use of AWS for a lot of UK departments due to data sovereignty concerns.
> I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed.

Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (you wanted to build) straight up impossible.

Turns out building companies is very difficult. If the first thing you do is sell out, perhaps you don’t have what it takes.
Notably Google is currently doing layoffs while simultaneously paying Deepmind / Brain MLEs $1-$10m counters to keep them from OpenAI https://seekingalpha.com/news/4055187-google-said-to-use-spe...
Is this article out of the past? Battery-powered leaf blowers now seem to be about the same price as gas-powered ones.

Where did this guy find a US$2200 leaf blower? For that price, it should be autonomous. The most expensive Stihl electric leaf blower I can find is $699.
My arguments are:

(P1) Current SOTA AI is good at understanding implicit context, and improved versions will likely be better at understanding implicit context (much like gpt-4 is better at understanding context than gpt-3, and llama2 is better than llama1, and mixtral is better than gpt-3 and better than claude, etc).

(P2) Most misalignments within the observable behavior of current AI do not produce extinction-level goals, and given (P1), it is unclear why someone would believe it's likely going to in the future, since they'll be even better at understanding implicit human context of goals (e.g. implicit goals like do not make humanity extinct, don't turn the entire surface of the planet into an AI lab, etc).

(C) Future AI will not likely be extinction-level misaligned with human goals.

I think there are several other arguments, though, e.g.:

(P1) Progress on AI capabilities is evolutionary, with dumber models slowly being replaced by derivative-but-better models, in terms of architectural evolutionary improvements (e.g. new attention variants), dataset evolutionary improvements as they grow larger and as finetuning sets grow higher quality, and in terms of benchmark and alignment evolutionary progress.

(P2) Evolutionary steps towards evil-AI will likely be filtered out during training, since it will not yet be generalized superhuman intelligence and will give away its misalignment during training, whereas legitimately-aligned AI model evolutions will be rewarded for better performance.

(P3) Generalized superhuman intelligence will likely be an evolutionary step from a well-aligned ordinary intelligence, which will be an evolutionary step from sub-human intelligence that is reasonably well aligned.

(C) Superhuman intelligence will have been evolutionarily refined to be reasonably well-aligned.

Or:

(P1) LLMs have architectural issues that will prevent them from quickly becoming generalized superintelligence of the "human vs slug" variety (bad/inefficient at math, tokenization issues, likelihood of hallucinations, limited ability to learn new facts without expensive and slow training runs, difficulty backtracking from incorrect chains of reasoning, etc).

(C) LLM research is not likely to soon produce a superhuman AI able to cause an extinction event for humanity, and should not be illegal.

However, ultimately my most strongly-believed personal argument is:

(P1) The burden of proof for making something illegal due to apocalyptic predictions lies on the prognosticator.

(P2) There is not much hard evidence of an impending apocalypse due to LLMs, and philosophical arguments for it are either self-referential and require belief in the apocalypse as a prerequisite, or are highly speculative, or both.

(C) LLM research should not be illegal.
Smells like the same sort of thing Opera tries to tell us about how private it is/was.
> Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more

Do you think this move didn't take even longer to plan?

> to shift blame

That reason is much more plausible.
Human rights=Sorcery. Cool.

"Open-source AI" is interesting in multiple ways, but not relevant to the legality of the models.

You know the "If ML is IP infringement then your brain is owned by Disney" take is just as sensible (and specious) for pre-ML stuff too, right? You're allowed to memorize the full script of any movie you want, without anyone trying even a little to claim that doing so should reduce your legal status to chattel, but obviously you're not allowed to just rip the subtitles from a DVD and sell it as a book.
I’m autistic. I do well programming but on the spot it’s hard for me to use words well. I sometimes even forget basic words and concepts! My brain does that due to stress in an interview, but day to day I’m fine developing very advanced software and algorithms.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this: you’re thinking about the average, neurotypical, able bodied persons when you assume things, but often logic or common sense does not work with disabled or neurodivergent people.

Please consider that next time maybe you can provide a second chance somehow with less stress. One thing is, if i have code in front of me, I can explain it pretty well I think. Maybe ask them to prepare samples and walk through them?

Edit: this was meant for the grand parent commenter
I think the characterization is unfair to generative AI, because the information that is retained in the model is a very lossy and rough generalization of the training data - that situation is a lot less direct than what it's like with search engines. In my mind, the lawsuits against search engines have a lot more ground to stand on. Saying that something "provides access to copyrighted content" almost implies that there's some mechanism that allows the user to wholesale download complete, unedited and exact copies of some copyrighted material - I could see that argument with a search engine, but not really with a text or image generator.
Thanks. I was looking forward to your input because ironclad is the usual reccomendation in the CL ecosystem and you are one of the few lispers who also did security work. I'm not in the field but to me the Ironclad library looks very well maintained and honnest. It is also well doccumented and the code is very readable. The maintainer seems anonymous but judging by their github profile they do mainly security work.
Check out the Gervais Principle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Compare also Tanner Greer on the same book: https://scholars-stage.org/wang-huning-and-the-eternal-retur...
That's Amazon.

There's a triangle, value employees, customers or suppliers. You can never have all 3.
I spent a little less than a year as a digital nomad living/working for about three weeks at a time in various cities in Italy, France, Austria, and Spain during my twenties. Barcelona's housing was my least favorite and not representative of any other place I stayed. I stayed in those 'superblocks', not near the old city where most tourists stay. It was the most 'American' feeling in terms of its walkability and how impersonal it felt.
> The majority of people don't tolerate the minorities.

The majority of people don't know, and don't care.

> Go on autism or trans reddit. It's full of people desperately trying to figure out how to fit in.

Obviously, beacuse people who figured out how to fit in just fit in, and don't hang out much on such subreddits. On those boards, you're dealing with a minority within a minority.
So you want Spotify to increase prices so that you get more money from your 10 listeners?

Because that's basically what you are asking for. There are millions of artists, and the number increases daily. Unless you charge more per user the pie is just getting split between more people. What you say is exactly the same as people were saying with every other medium. I have £10 to spend on entertainment this month, perhaps I'll buy your album, perhaps not, and now you see £0 from me instead of a bit.
No need to use curl, make HTTP requests great again with https://github.com/ducaale/xh
Former friend joined Google and started hitting his pet (violently and angrily) and doing heavy drugs. Anthony Levandowski might be an outlier at Google for criminal behavior as well as total comp, but there are plenty of Googlers who you want to have nothing to do with.
Yep, this is the reason OAuth2 exists.
> that office politics are 10x more important than merit in big companies

My experience (5 startups) is that office politics are 100x more important in small startups. Everything is more concentrated, including the politics. That's why there is so much cofounder drama to go around.

At least in a big company there's a lot of inertia and process to tone down the politics a little bit.
It's more about the money situation, or the availability of it at all. Most countries in the world do not have treatment for this. The US still has it to some degree but has tried to wipe it out
Americans have an extreme fetish about lawns (it's a matter of social status), and in temperate climates, they want lawns to stay green throughout the winter, so instead of "leaving the leaves", they often rake or use leafblowers (or for the case of 40% of homeowners, hire somebody). In the case of hired labor, homeowners are usually commuting from suburbs and their kids are at school so they don't have to deal with the noise themselves. Lawn grass is the number 1 crop in the United States, and it exists only to absorb excess wealth and make work for others in games of social status in a culture that originally sought to emulate the symbols of wealth of English landowners, as a neatly cut lawn was an indication of wool production, originally the primary English export during the time of the enclosure movement. But with post-WWII suburban housing subsidies, each house began to have a lawn and most people don't want sheep, so the use of lawnmowers and fertilizer to began to supplant the job of sheep.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic...

https://dcist.com/story/20/03/06/the-white-house-lawn-was-on...
Very cool! Thanks for the reply.

It would be awesome if you could also add GPT-4 as a kind of helpful tutor. Not sure if you're already experimenting with that.

> Our spaced repetition model not only accounts for implicit "trickle-down" repetitions but also minimizes the number of reviews by choosing reviews whose implicit repetitions "knock out" other due reviews (like dominos), and calibrates the speed of the spaced repetition process to each individual student on each individual topic (student ability and topic difficulty are competing factors).

That's super interesting and definitely one of the issues I faced while building anki cards for math classes I took in undergrad. Thanks again!
Is that really because Google workers are seen as worse employees (like what the original post said), or just because the job market is now suddenly loaded with thousands of Google employees who'd just been laid off?
Hard disagree.

These books are not textbooks but Companions thus giving one history, development, concepts, ideas etc. of Mathematics. This is very similar to Encyclopedias/Dictionaries that every family generally has in its "personal library" but just more detailed w.r.t. Mathematics.

By "comprehensive" i meant the books are comprehensive and not that one has to study every bit of it. Pick and choose topics/terminologies as you come across them at whatever level you want. You are adding to your education and not necessarily trying to become a "Mathematician". Every "educated person" (STEM or not) with curiosity to understand more about the World (and all-pervasive technologies in particular) has to have some idea of "Modern Maths" at some level. This is why you have so many "popular science and mathematics" books. While these companion books are not "popular maths" books they make a very good reference for when one wants more breadth and depth but not necessarily a full-blown textbook. These are also great "motivators" for students by sparking their curiosity (and perhaps inspire some to become Mathematicians)) since they catalog so much within one pair of covers.
Every morning from 8-9 someone blows the two dozen large leaves out of the park across the way. I wish they just pick them up, it would go faster even. They do it when it’s wet! Do you know how badly wet leaves react to leaf blowers?!
So they had 7 people to pay, and also pay for hosting, rent, equipment and utilities. That means at least 1 million per year.

How were they going to do it without outside funding if the creators subscribing weren't paying at least that amount? Ask for donations on Patreon?
For splunk you can set unit by setting span like this | timechart span=30s count by X
Can you apply your skills to other leadership positions?
Me too!

I have a few scripts and dev environments that use App Passwords to send email via Gmail SMTP!
Equinix Cloud Fabric
It's not always bad security.

a) I have apps with their own Google accounts

b) I have devices with their own Google accounts

It is (or was) a good way to go. Receiving an email from a scanner or sharing something with an app on Google Drive is a lot more secure than OAuth + "This app will have access to EVERYTHING IN YOUR GOOGLE DRIVE"
App Passwords have always worked fine for us, and have done for years!
Google to Take India's Unified Payments Interface Global
Been dealing with Microsofts OAuth transition at work, and it's been a bit of a PITA.

Part of the problem is that it's just so opaque. You send the token and the server replies "nope", with no further explanation.

I spent literal days trying to figure out why Client Credentials-flow didn't work until I found an answer buried on their help forum saying oh yeah, client credentials flow isn't supported yet. It is now for IMAP/POP, but still not for SMTP IIRC (though OAuth is not requiredfor SMTP yet).

Next it was figuring out the right scopes, which at the time was not very well documented. Again not very helpful error messages by the servers.

Google's mail servers any better?
There are some more examples:

• In the stringification via `#`, whitespaces are significant but any run will be converted to a single canonical space character.

• Macros can only be redefined when conflicting definitions are identical, where all whitespace separations are considered identical and trailing whitespaces are ignored. So you can put multiple copies of `#define FOO 3 + 4` with differing number of whitespaces, but `#define FOO 3+4` is not considered identical.

> Similarly, `1 1` is not the same as `11`, `0x 1` is not `0x1`, and `0. 0` is not `0.0`.

There is some interesting surprise here because the tokenization specifically looks for the preprocessing number (the `pp-number` non-terminal), which is a superset of both integers and floating points. There exist a set of preprocessing-only numerals, like `0xe+4`, which would be a syntax error once got past the preprocessor.

> Spaces are significant in escape sequences as well - "\n" is different from "\ n".

This is most visible when the space is between `\` and a newline. GCC and Clang accepts this as an extension but will issue the "backslash and newline separated by space" warning.

> Before C23, sequences like `??/` (but not `? ? /`) were alternative ways of spelling many other characters.

Note that digraphs (`%>` here) are still allowed. Trigraphs were problematic as they were very early textual replacements (even earlier than the tokenization!), while digraphs are just separate tokens with the same semantics.
When you can’t parody reality because it just outdoes your efforts.
How Timebanking Works
I used one-switch-driving most of the time in my non-electric BMW 5. The cruise control up-down switch (+/-10km clicks, +/=1km nudges) on the steering wheel was very convenient to operate. The acceleration very smooth, as was
the regenetative braking deceleration. I consistently had better fuel economy that way than other drivers with the same model.

Everything has to allign though for this to feel great. I have tried it with other cars, and it never felt as good.
This is just one example of many.

https://www.scag.com/product/wheeled-blowers/extreme/
Unfortunately a battery powered leaf blower sound is almost as annoying as a combustion engine powered one. It's "quieter" for sure if decibels are measured but it makes a quite loud high pitch brain piercing squeal.

I have neighbors with both kinds of leaf blowers, and I can't decide which one is more annoying.
Do you live near an airport (<20/50 miles/km) or near weather stations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_frequency_selection?

You are probably using channels that interfere with radar and when a router detects the radar, it should shutdown for a minute or so.
In this article, we’ll delve into the Lidar-based application development process, focusing on stand-alone Lidar, the pros and cons of working with its data, and what tasks we can complete within Lidar-based applications.
> What about terrorism, though?

What about the principles the US was founded upon, though?

Will you maintain those principles even though terrorists are flying aircraft into your buildings? Or will you break and start stripping your citizens of their rights, surveilling them without warrant in a desperate bid to stop future terrorists?

The US made its choice. The price of freedom is high and paid in blood. They no longer want to pay it. The consequences will come.

> I ask these questions in earnest.

I hold that these questions are ultimately irrelevant. It seems like these terrorists won either way. America was destroyed, even if only spiritually. Principles it once stood for, stand no more.
Note that google3 is a subset of the entire Google codebase. But it still contain more than half of its code (>2B LoC), mostly those running over their cloud. In contains all the infrastructure code as well, including Linux kernel, compiler, tool chain... literally everything needed. When you build some big binaries, you may see more than 500k~1M build targets analyzed and built (or pulled from cache).
True! I have a Makita leaf blower. It uses the same battery as my other power tools. It was therefore very cheap and is as good or better than my previous, gas powered one. I can just about do my terrain on a 5Ah battery.
It isn't? AWS is crazy expensive and you don't have as much control over things as you may occasionally need. The best decision we took in the past few years with regards to infrastructure was moving away from AWS and doing everything ourselves.

On RDS we had inexplicable spikes in cost, deteriorating support and no real support for any of our issues. When we tried using DMS, it just didn't work as expected, even after spending two days on the phone with their support.
Runbox is good.
I heavily disagree.
To preface - I have a recent and a successful PhD in Comp Sci. During grad school I've known active grads who jump onto the "next big thing". Well, long story short - almost every "next big thing" eventually dies down, every single one of them ended up being a generic Software Engineer after heavily specializing in the "next big thing" because, unfortunately, the cycle of the next big thing just keeps on rolling and within 3-5 years the current "big thing" may become entirely irrelevant, which ended up being the case for them.
I understand this might not be very helpful, but I suggest doing the footwork to figure out the intersection of something you truly have an interest in as well as a tech with a potential and specialize in that.