skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed, but a function of technology; and side effects such as pollution or climate change are just more problems to be solved. As long as we can keep coming up with new ideas, growth can continue.

There are a lot of big ifs in this statement.
> I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around.

While the amount of biodiversity can be measured objectively, the notion of it being "good" is completely made up. You need humans to judge what's "good" and which means that for any "good" kind of future humans are essential and are more important than say biodiversity.
The broader idea of “pass a value between functions without naming it in the caller” crops up in a few other places outside FP.

In Rust there is the “builder pattern”[0] where the builder isn’t mentioned directly:

ByValueBuilder::new()
.with_favorite_number(42)
.with_favorite_programming_language("Rust")
.build()

In OO land they are called “fluent interfaces”[1], commonly used when building SQL queries while only mentioning the final query at the end:

query = translations
.Where(t => t.Key.Contains("a"))
.OrderBy(t => t.Value.Length)
.Select(t => t.Value.ToUpper());

Especially in the query builder example, since it is essentially building up an AST, the type of the top-level object can change in each call, but since it isn’t named it also doesn’t need to be typed, so there’s no issue with variable shadowing etc.

[0] https://blog.logrocket.com/build-rust-api-builder-pattern/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface
> Regions become incredibly inefficient.

Tokyo? Seoul? Manhattan? London? Paris? All very dense. Also very economically efficient. All have great metro systems, so it is easy to move around.
This article is brainless and attempts to make no argument other than "The more people there are, the more solutions to problems will be found" which hasn't happened yet despite massive population growth over the last 75 years. This kind of low quality content seems pervasive here lately. I can only presume it's the result of a generally lower quality of participant here lately.
Are you sure it's something openai wants vs something they are just doing as a caution against lawsuits/negative publicity/real harm?
Maybe i’m just used to it but I don’t mind using Pandas, in jupyter notebook feels quite intuitive this feedback
Their tutorial and concept guide is quite good, also to understand basic accounting concepts: https://gnucash-docs-rst.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#
Of course its true - we wouldn't have gotten to the moon, or been able to build world-encompassing highway and Internet systems, without the critical mass of people who built our academic and industrial institutions.

To see the nature of your fallacy, just look out at your universities and wonder how they will operate, as effectively as they have so far, with half the staff. And then, that staff halves again in 10 years.

Doing this, honestly, do you still have faith that the deleterious effect of humanity upon itself will be replenished with new perspectives, new generations, new ideas?

We humans are instinctively cannibals. We don't eat each other literally any more, but spiritually and culturally. The moment there is less of that human culture to consume, the closer we get to actually reverting to the physical manifestation of it ..
The climate change anxiety is super real just most politicians are too old and out of touch to understand it.

If we don't turn tide on our fight against climate change dramatically and like, yesterday, there is absolutely no chance my kids will be thinking about having kids. The world will just be a wreck by that point.

Want to fix the birth rate? Make people economically and physically more secure.
> After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

> Well, no.

Well, yes. CD splits enshittification into three phases (EEE, kind of) but does not so with capitalism. He argues that capitalism brought us the internet and doesnt elaborate further on his favorite cherry (on ISP's aggressive monetization or net neutrality, etc.) but he ignores that profit driven platforms brought us value in their early stages too. So big-tech good again or still very much unlike capitalsim or what? (Please dont fall for this short sighted argument.)

I really dont like CW enshittifying the much needed systemic discussion in order to monetize his brand (this is unfair, i know). In the end its all about incentive structures which is inherent to the system.

> I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions [And why they are made everywhere, not just in big-tech!]

Maybe some day CD will discover enshittified US life expectancy or climate/environment or any other big-corp non-digital service.
The awesome thing about software is that you don't actually need a human there to supervise software checking a website five million times per week.

I have built a self-healing system with observability in place to catch and page me when there are issues that can't fix themselves - it works quite well.

I can't speak to your personal experience, but I've never had a problem with an employer and running my own business. The idea that a single employee even shows up on the radar as a competitor to a multi-billion dollar corporation makes me laugh though.
Do you know about https://www.couchsurfing.com

It is really great!

Just don't burden your hosts with the full story :) If you try out this avenue, be positive and talk about all the good things in your life.
The world population in 1900 was only 1.6 Billion. We're at 8 Billion now, and they predict capping at 10-11 Billion.

Even if the cap is true (and it's all theory at this point), I think the words "too few humans" does not mean what they think it means.
Applying the intended software architecture to the org chart is often known as the Inverse Conway Manoeuvre.
Because we have parts of our brain that supervise other parts of our brain and evaluate its output.

For example: if you smoke pot and get paranoid, it's because pot dials back the work of the part of your brain that prunes thought paths that are not applicable. Normally, paranoid thoughts do not make sense, so they are discarded. That's also why you're more 'creative' when you smoke pot, less thought paths are pruned and more stuff that doesn't quite make sense gets through. Or thoughts that overly focus on some details get through, which are normally not required.

Our brains are inherently "higher level", current AI is hopelessly simplistic by comparison.
> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children.

I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else".

Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can. It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the home the live in; the car they drive; ability to vacation; newest phone model, etc.

Generally, the more money you make in the US, the fewer kids you have. So, for most, it's hard to argue that they can't "afford" children. They can't afford children while maintaining their same lifestyle. And that will generally always be true (except for the truly rich).
You must watch a lot of french propaganda to have some romantic young rosy view on "hostage taking". Except for those who profit from the system's abuses (such as your colleagues) most people very much support the strikes. It's only the TV stations claiming otherwise, but look at the actual polls for example against the pension reform last year...

Can you name a single person that died due to health care strikes? No, because even when on strike health care workers perform their duties. They simply wear a badge or demonstrate outside of job hours. You're just spitting outright lies. However, we can name the many people (the number keeps rising every year) dying from job "accidents", which is one of the reasons unions and strikes exist.

Solidarity is precisely supporting others in their struggles. And yes, there is a lot of that. If you actually went on a strike's picket line, you would see a lot of different people from different jobs, including unemployed or retired people. Some people bring coffee or food, others materials to build barricades or wood to burn to keep warm in winter... Not everyone is as selfish as your colleagues who only care about missing a train and not why people are actually on strike.

All power to the Ubisoft workers, and to all other workers on strike.
> Or they can take the heavy handed law and order approach, like say Singapore or Saudi Arabia or even Japan, which are some of the safest places in the world.

I feel like you are conflating two things here that are not related. These places can take the heavy handed law and order approach they have because they are some of the safest places in the world. Unsurprisingly, at least in Japan, it’s nearly impossible to not have some form of housing if you want it. Even the lowest convenience store job will give you enough income to pay for the rent on a one-room apartment.
Population is separate to climate change.
I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places.

Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany.

Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from smaller cities and towns to Tokyo.

The end result is that small towns are, quite literally, dying. Small cities are emptying out. Rural regions are beginning to resemble retirement estates, complete with hobby farms.

The "solution" is immigration -- if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese, or a Lebanese man will become accepted as Croatian. I don't think that's going to happen in either place. In Croatia, I know a bunch of Chicagoans of Croatian descent who moved "back to the homeland." Nobody in Croatia accepts them as "real Croatians." They're going to be part of some expat community for life. It's going to be even worse with culturally distinct foreigners. And it's going to lead to trouble. If there's an elegant way to manage this, I'm not aware of it.
> Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans

This can be easily and summarily dismissed if you know anything about minimum population numbers. Humans will never, through simple declining birth rates, reach the low-or-sub-1000s numbers that would result in there being too few humans to maintain genetic diversity.

https://www.livescience.com/minimum-people-to-survive-apocal...

> how many people would it take to keep our species going? The short answer is, it depends.

> "With populations in the low hundreds, you can probably survive for many centuries. And many small populations of that kind have survived for centuries and perhaps millennia," Cameron Smith, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University in Oregon, told Live Science.

What the article is really just arguing is that scientific advancement relies on larger populations, which, cool story bro. Having more kids in economically or ecologically untenable situations just to keep new tech being sold, is not a serious argument that people who are choosing not to have kids are going to be receptive to.
On the cause of long Covid-associated cognitive impairment
This article reinforces my knee-jerk dislike of philosophy. This article - like many works produced by philosophers - provides some contrarian ideas with zero evidence to back them up.

I think it confuses causation and correlation by claiming that having more people, faster population growth, leads to finding solutions to major problems humanity deals with faster. I don’t buy that. In fact, I’d say our inventiveness has been the _cause_ of both population decline and solving the major issues the article mentions (like progressing agriculture to use less resources)

I also think it takes a too anthropocentric stance. In the beginning of the article it claims that population decline is bad for the planet, but surely humanity going extinct does not have a net negative effect on the planet. As many climate change critics are prone to point out, nature will do what it wants despite the influence of humans and nature will adapt with or without us.
It is a reskin of Quillette.
ClickHouse automatically detects variations of the JSONEachRow format:

- allowing optionally enclosing the data into an array;

- allowing comma as an optional separator between objects;

- allowing JSON objects without a newline separator;

- properly escaping Unicode newlines and / characters inside string literals for JavaScript compatibility;

- allowing binary data inside string literals;
As i replied to the sibling comment, coming from another species perspective it would be reasonable to assume that a world optimized to fulfill the need of another species, such as humans would be seen as negative. It's not like they can enact their discontent, so i would argue we have to account for other species as well when we remodel the natural world.

Evolutionary adaptation takes a while, so its not nice to change things fast.
If we had to wager whether there was any genetic component to intelligence differences among humans, I think the safe wager is on “there is some” over “there is none”.
True but both the Nvidia and Apple offerings are kinda long in the tooth now and in need of an update.

It's rumoured that a new apple TV will come out soon. I've been looking at the options because I'm getting sick of the many ads on my fire TV stick.

I only have a 1080p TV so the rendering isn't really an issue for me.
Agreed, the latest SW release is unbearably slow, I've started moving to cheap rk boxes.
Perhaps solving hallucinations at the LLM level alone is impossible, hence the inevitability. I reckon that lots of human “hallucination” is simply caught by higher-level control loops operating over the output of the generative mechanism. Basically, our conscious mind says, “nah, that doesn’t look right” enough that most of the time most of us don’t “hallucinate”.
As said, I no longer read any medium article. I understand some in-depth article you may need. But even economists can provide some free article per month. Not even that.
Quite obvious, I want there to be more people if my culture around, whereas I do not mind whether the rest of the cultures dwindle to the numbers more appropriate for them.

Everybody is more or less like that, and here is where the issue roots.

Right now, some influential cultures, but not all of them, feel existentially endangered.
> Dramatic hormone shifts as a result of that last bit.

A result of the foods or a result of obesity facilitated by them? What is the evidence basis for there being clinically significant changes in hormone levels in the population at large?
For tables that don't need to scale infinitely, and to trade off in simplicity and keeping logic in the application, I use a version column.

It's the "brute force" type approach. It doesn't scale, has performance penalties, but it's incredibly easy to use and understand, and time walking is trivial.

Relies heavily on DISTINCT ON.

On truly old tables I've added "maintenance tasks" that push old rows into an archive/audit table.

Edit/note - I realise if you suggest this at any of the big players, you'll probably be fired on the spot.
Wow didn't know there was a mobile app. How do you sync?
Even if I grant the premise that we should maximize the number of humans, it's not clear that growing the population immediately achieves that, unless you're biased to favor of humans alive in the year 2025 above humans alive further into the future.

A less biased objective is to maximize the expected value of the number of all humans that will ever exist from now onwards. Then you have to start thinking about things like global warming which will cause destabilizations (e.g. large scale climate refugees fleeing the equator in the year 2060 and the rise of authoritarianism in the global north as a reaction) which causes future population decline which is self-sabotaging of the objective of increasing the number of humans.

I think the real problem here is really just global warming. If we can fix that, we should be able to add many more billions of people, with all the associated upsides and without the biggest downside.
> Continue training the LLM until such a time as it replies to the input "A" with "yes" and all other inputs with "no".

This is basically the same as saying "train your LLM until they never hallucinate", which reduces your claim to a tautology: an LLM trained not to hallucinate does not hallucinate. The trick is making that happen.
They are still talking about it in both articles on the frontpage including this shitty one. wtf is wrong with you all telling me to read the article without reading it yourself?
Birth rate is not a law of nature that can be naively extrapolated. Increased pace of technological development implies an increased pace of societal changes, which will impact birth rate.

Predicting birth rate for 2060 from today might be roughly equivalent to someone in 1850 trying to extrapolate birth rate to 1950. They would have been completely wrong because there was no way they could predict the level of development.

Even ignoring that, shouldn't we expect birth rate to be autocorrelated, as the impact of having children, and therefore people's decisions to do so, would depend on the population count itself?
Reading this I'm glad having chosen Chromecast w Google TV last week for my new "dumb tv".

I didn't have the opportunity to try Fire stick but slowness and an unpolished UI what I was fearing. Google TV otoh has a polished interface, supports all streaming services and the remote can control your TV as well.

Can recommend.

Despite being an Apple user who bought into the ecosystem, I don't like any of their offerings in the media streaming space. Too expensive, too much lock-in, catalogues too small.
I cannot follow your comment.

Being automatically cancellable is part of the value proposition of the future abstraction: it lets you abandon unnecessary work automatically. This post is about a limitation on cancellation (cancellation itself must be synchronous).

To me, your comment appears to be a sort of vibey free word association. Microcodes? Pick a side? What on earth are you actually trying to express??
> Who says we need to fill it up in a reasonable time frame?

So you yourself are saying anything longer than a month is unreasonable?

In any case, this lab experiment will need much improvement in speed and energy requirements.
This might be pedantic, but iirc email clients don‘t execute any javascript due to security concerns (at least that was the case when I worked in email marketing 7 or so years ago).

The javascript is basically only used for templating, defining reusable components and rendering the static HTML together with inline CSS which does make a lot of sense because writing „bulletproof“ email components that work on every client is a huge amount of work and you would generally like to keep the amount doing that to a minimum.

In my experience every company uses some type of email templating system, some off the shelf, some built in-house, I actually got my start in (actual) programming by building one for my team.
> We don't actually care at all about what happened in the two experiments per se, we care about the information provided by the experiments about future or other events.

How can the experiments provide relevant information other than through what happened?

If what happened is exactly the same (first patient with such and such characteristics had this outcome, etc.) what information can be provided by the things that didn’t happen in either?

How could it matter that the things that didn’t happen in one experiment are different from the things that didn’t happen in the other when we are interested in the information provided by what did happen?

We don't actually care at all about the distribution of things that could have happened per se, we care about the information provided by the experiments about future or other events.
At least some of the language features motivated by async are also useful in other places, e.g. RFCs 3425 and 2033

And the "bit more wasteful" part is a non-starter because people want to use async in embedded contexts.
The way I see it, Rust is trying to do something novel -- imperative-style async/await in a 'true' systems language. That's a fundamentally hard problem, so their implementation is going to have warts. But it will serve as a great reference for the next batch of languages developed which want to do such things. The work is valuable for the state of computing, even if we don't get something perfectly and spotless in Rust itself.
Other than genetic minimum population numbers, there should be civilization minimum population numbers, and I'd suspect modern technology would allow for a few hundred(?) million people to hold up the same standard of living and progress.
> they need wealthy enough families to afford public school

Note that what the UK origin term “public schools” means is not the same as what that means in other countries, which can confuse these discussions in a global forum. (In the US, we’d call that “private school”.)
The brain fakes it to approximate reality - more so for reasons of the limitations of the wetware it runs on than anything else.

For others here is a TED talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY
Related ongoing thread:

Selfish reasons to want more humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39497686 - Feb 2024 (214 comments)
Ummm, no. Even though the idea is noble and straightforward, in today's world there is a lot more that needs to be saved in a KeePass vault than just simple passwords. MFA recovery codes, account numbers, card numbers, associated usernames, secondary emails, alternate URLs, referral information, and so on. In my humble opinion, we really do need an encrypted personal database rather than simple password function.
> I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else".

No, what many of us mean is that "We can't afford to give a child the kind of support and resources and opportunities that a responsible parent knows it is their job to provide."

Many of us grew up poor, and saw people around us who didn't make it out. Many of them are still poor bordering on destitute, some are in prison, a couple I know are dead. Until I can *reasonably guarantee* that I'm not putting my kid in that position, I'm not going to have a kid.
Why do you expect hallucination frequency to be the same when the LLM doesn't even remotely compare to a human brain yet? And what do they have to "look like"?
This always reminds me of that time Bing's chat AI doubled down on a wrong fact about the Avatar 2 movie, which people used as evidence that the technology is dumb when it really is exactly the behaviour you can observe in many people every day. And there's a reason adults do it less frequently than children.

Compare the hallucination behaviour of a 7B model with a 70B model and then GPT4 and you'll quickly see the frequency of hallucinations right now doesn't mean much.