skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporate rent seeking would seem to be a more prevalent example, even in the context of government. For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.
It’s more a criticism of top-down hierarchical control of institutions (at any scale) than it is an indictment of humans cooperating around some goal

Cui bono makes that clear
> Gemma 7B is a 9B model. The name is a lie

Ohhh so that explains why I couldn't load it on my RTX 4090, while other 7B models load just fine!
the context window is entirely limited by VRAM size

do you even LLM?
Interview with Artificalist Intelligence (A.I.) Founder 2024 [video]
Don't be ridiculous. Technology is confusing.

A person should spend decades of their life studying law and practicing it and then have their career ended because they didn't realize that this new tool everyone said was so amazing was fundamentally and conceptually different from every search engine he'd seen before and (unlike what he otherwise would have used, Westlaw) comes up with random made up but very plausible sounding precedents when you ask it for legal research?

Embarrassed, called out, fined? Of course. But that's not a serious argument. Unless you think someone should be legally prohibited from ever being paid as a programmer for the rest of their life for blowing up a server or failing to maintain a backup system or something

This is a mistake, and a pretty easy to understand one. It's not stealing client's money or tampering with a witness or something.
That’s pretty different from what the headline is contending, though… Your statement is certainly true, of course, but the article is specifically claiming a link to cancer.
As much as I hate looking at colleges and grades, and try not to let them influence my hiring decisions, I see a correlation between both quality of school and academic record and job performance. Correlation does not mean causation, and it’s a heuristic and not a rule. Many individuals are exceptions to this heuristic. However, when hiring and faced with a lot of applicants, we need to make decisions based on whatever signals are available.

One example is sloppy resumes with grammar and spelling mistakes. What does spelling have to do with coding? Both require care and attention, and your resume reflects how much care and attention dedicate to things.
No, it's good that the public understands that AIs are wrong so regularly that we need a special word dedicated to this one specific manner in which they're wrong.

Generative AI output is becoming inextricably associated with this word, and that's not a bad thing to keep people aware of.
Thanks!
I really appreciate the PR
>For example, most of the US defense budget goes directly to the military industrial media complex instead of the uniformed military.

Source? I would be surprised if the highest category of military spend was not healthcare (including VA) plus salaries (including DB pensions) plus benefits, which is all payroll expense to employees.
Encapsulation is extremely important and pairs with single responsibility, but that’s completely orthogonal to OOP.

Once you are solidly in the composition camp, functions are immediately superior. They tend to be naturally single purpose and have mathematical rules that make them easy to compose.

Most function-heavy languages also adopted modules which provide a better, less-leaky abstraction too and that’s without getting into all the other advantages in the type system or better syntactic ergonomics from dropping all the OOP baggage.
I know. That why I wrote:

> offhoring ... hasn’t made a big dent in US tech employment
I really enjoy and am inspired by the idea that people like Dettmer (and probably this Samsja person) are the spiritual successors to homebrew hackers in the 70s and 80s. They have pretty intimate knowledge of many parts of the whole goddamn stack, from what's going on in each hardware component, to how to assemble all the components into a rig, up to all the software stuff: algorithms, data, orchestration, etc.

Am also inspired by embedded developers for the same reason
If you like thrash and great vocals, check out Forbidden if you haven't. Late 80s early 90s technical thrash whose singer has some wild range. Twisted Into Form is their best album IMO. Their reunion album Omega Wave is also excellent.
Interesting points, and thanks for the link!
yes, thanks for your response
The history of chat products at Google is a case study in clutching defeat from the jaws of victory, but Google should get some credit for their AI naming. Google rolled out products very fast and definitely didn't get the initial naming right, but they are getting things straightened out now.
There's some good advice here but I take issue with this statement:

> I used to ask ‘tell me one of the SOLID principle you strongly agree or disagree with’ but I had to stop because it ended up with the interviewee listing/describing the SOLID principles rather than critiquing them.

How many people have internalized every part of SOLID such that they can immediately start critiquing one of the items?

I learned about SOLID in some book 10+ years ago and I'm going to need a minute to remind myself what the acronym stands for. It's a sign that I'm taking your question seriously rather than just giving pros and cons of the first random thing that pops into my head.

I think this is just a bad question and that it reflects poorly on the author that they automatically assumed the fault lies with the majority of interviewees.
Names make things easier to discuss, acknowledge, and try to maintain personal awareness of.
The ultimate red pill in my life has been working with Harvard grads, and being shocked at how mediocre they are.
This is more or less Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Whatsapp now has an AI chat feature which includes chatbots such as relationship coach, travel expert, career coach
I have a BX750MI and this one still works. Still, it is good to have the warning.
Not just institutions, individuals too. I’ve seen many individuals ‘dig their heels’ into protecting their own pet project/baby/solution/etc, mainly due to ego.

It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
> The article is not about GNOME. It is about GNOME 3.

The article title literally mentions "GNOME and GNOME 3".
Counterpoints:

- Local models are pretty easy to de-censor, if thats what you mean.

- ...Yeah, it should not be labeled as a 7B. Its sort of 7B class.

- The repo mentions they use the llama-cpp-python server

- 1M context brute forced across TPUs is insanely expensive, I can see why Google reigned it in.

But overall your message is not wrong. Google is hyping Gemma a ton when its... Well, not very remarkable. And they could have certainly made something niche and interesting, like a long context 8.5B model, a specialized model, a vastly more multilingual model, something to differentiate it from Mistral 7B 0.2
So we can't talk about it and analyze it?
The article mentions this in the very end, but isn't the "Shirky principle" just a case of perverse incentives? Allocating a budget to solving a problem continuously does set the incentives to prolong the problem.

I wonder how much paying after the problem is solved would help vs. paying in advance as it is often done for agencies / institutions.
Thank you. tippecanoe is provided by nixpkgs and you can search for it in "PACKAGES" tab in geospatial-nix.today.
I heard, the climate related "CO2 fertilization" leads to increased growth in trees. However, especially on mountain slopes, these trees have a lower strength and tend to break more easily in storms. The breakage in softer woods in turn promotes things like wind erosion and fires.

I think this is somewhat plausible, since the "winter side" of a wood ring is the harder bit and the ratio of hard to soft wood may change due to increased summer growth.

Iceland is the prime example of a place, which lost its trees a bit - and then lost its trees for real, as a consequence. That is, because of wind erosion after humans started cutting down most of the island's forests for lumber.

Thanks, for coming to my TED talk.
I missed the jump from 'we found an egg in a well' to 'it must be Roman!' Anybody got insight into this?
> Isn't it better to look forward rather than back?

After looking into some basic Zen philosophy, I think it also makes sense to consider focusing on spending more time in the present. The past and the future being ideas compared to the reality of the present - it's like watching a movie compared to real life. If the plight of the old is to reminisce, perhaps the plight of the young is to daydream. Both are important parts of life, but taking time to appreciate the present is easy to leave out.
Why go to college and develop critical thinking when you can just accept the doctrine of state capitalism and make money for the big guys leeching off the state and weakening our institutions?
> you'd be an idiot if you don't mass apply using your resume. Everyone does it, so you have to as well.

I've been on the receiving end of mass applications. If you stopped justifying your spam behind "everyone does it" (no they don't) and started tailoring your applications, leaning on your network (or building one up) you may need a lot fewer.

I have never mass applied, so I may seem idiotic to you. But even during the times I quit a job before looking for another, I've never been on the market for more than 2 weeks.
Dialectical Man: Two Books on Hegel
Yes, sadly this is an easy way for people to dishonestly claim to themselves and others that any attempt to solve problems (other than the "problem" of how to generate ever greater wealth disparity which somehow never gets included in this) is completely worthless
Interesting, why not law? It feels like it would be one of the last fields to be automated away. Especially trial lawyers.
Government officials for republics function to serve a greatest common denominator that doesn't even exist in reality. So there's no political representation at all for free software.

Well, the greatest common denominator for political representation does exist. But it by its nature excludes free software as even a talking point. Namely that capitalism is mutually exclusive from free software. Capitalism hates free software to the point that free software cannot even literally get a word, a voice, or a conceptualization that can help refine it.

That leaves us with the only realistic options for supporting quality efforts in free software being volunteer work that isn't empowered. Everything goes downhill from there. Grants and company lip service are only superficial reactions to the free software problem.
Such an important principle when considering the governance of and improvement of societies.

I noted that the article didn't mention the War on Drugs; probably books have been written about the Shirky principle and the US's war on drugs.
But there is no need to use the name of a guy to describe the problem. It's like naming hacking the principle of Zuck
The optimal path (at least if you're not going into a regulated/gatekept profession, or not from a very poor/disadvantaged background on a full ride, or using the university program as an immigration pathway) seems to be:
1) Get accepted to a top school
2) Enroll and then drop out (figure out the minimum for your school to consider you a dropout -- I think you probably have to register and take classes for a semester, but you may be able to simply not pay the bill)
3) 20 under 20 (or just do a startup/get a job/continue with life directly)

You get >50% of the value of the school (proxy for an IQ test, basically, although with the decline of testing this is less obvious -- still, even without rigorous testing, many people, especially those far from academia, consider "accepted to top school" to be valuable.)

I basically did this (out of necessity; I couldn't afford to pay for MIT), but it's worked out well, and it's worked out pretty well for other people I know. With dropout you need to distinguish between "dropped out to do X, or for decent extenuating circumstance" vs "too much drugs", though, when looking at stats.
Maybe I don't know enough but I believe having any person talk about a few random projects from their CV and me asking them questions relevant to their position would give me a pretty good understanding of how much someone is knowledgeable in their field, as well as their confidence and general curiosity (it's ok if they just know their bit but plus points if they can also talk about design, business and/or other parts outside of their role.)

Of course one could learn that by heart and fool me but I'm also pretty sure people are currently wasting/spending their time memorising acronyms and leetcode just to get someone to give them a chance, so I'd rather have both enjoy the process.
It's difficult to get good estimates of biosphere uptake and release of atmospheric carbon by looking at satellite color data - those numbers involve a lot of modeling. Rough estimates are that the biosphere cycles 100 gigatons of carbon a year through the atmosphere (plants taking up CO2 to form biomass, fungi/insects/animals breaking down plant matter to CO2), while human fossil fuel emissions are on the order of 9 gigatons C per year at present, perhaps half of which stays in the atmosphere long-term.

There's little doubt that the planet is heading back to Pliocene conditions at a steady clip, and of course life was abundant back then - indeed without fossil fuels the planet would be on a steady cooling trend back to another ice age (it would take some 70,000 years though to reach another ice age maximum), so if you want to celebrate that achievement, go ahead - but note, you don't want to overshoot the target so immediate elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source is the only rational conclusion.

Here's a paper on the issue of how to link satellite color data to photosynthetic production, see Figs 5 / 6/ 7 for estimates of very moderate increases from 1982-2017 (satellite collection only began c.1982) across the northern hemisphere (but steep declines in the Amazon):

"Improved estimate of global gross primary production for reproducing its long-term variation, 1982–2017", Zheng et. al 2020

Atmospheric CO2 accumulation increased from ~1.5 to ~2.5 ppm/year over that period, coinciding with a rough doubling in global fossil fuel consumption since 1980 (plus a lot of nitrogen fertilizers), along with a +0.2C per decade (5yr running avg) temperature increase.
Legal barriers to entry and similar regulations are often the form entrenched players use to preserve their problem.

It's a hard balance to strike because the examples of harm from too little regulation make easy soundbites. But the costs of the certification are complex and difficult to quantify, albeit very real.
I've considered just converting to JSON , editing, then converting back to yaml. Yaml is a nightmare and I've no idea why it ever caught on.
As the article says: "College is not for everyone" but I think the article should be more balanced because there are areas of study that you (most people) could only grasp going to college. It is not the same studying operating systems in college, do the study and the practice, "suffer" exams that just reading information on Internet. There is a pressure and specific topics when you study that produces a deep effect in the brain and makes you click.

I also think there is a third way with open universities and new pedagogical material. For example, when cybersecurity started gaining tractions, a friend was concerned about having more people understanding how to develop exploits and put exercises online [1]. It started with relatively easy exercises and moved to advanced ones.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150123211322/http://community....
Is this confusing? yea. Is there another company with a high volume of products that has an intuitive naming scheme across its products? I don't really think so...
“Theoretical” only applies to the first item in the list. The list is generally about questions related to recalling the meaning of terms.
Acerbic, I think, but not really passive aggressive.
If the mandarins salaries and livelihood depend on it they will move mountains to sustain the institution. This is human nature. The problem with public institutions is that they fase few external pressures. A company will eventually die and history is littered by the corpses of former industry titans. Public institutions on the other hand.
> But normal people is happy with the specific solutions in the meantime.

I'm not discussing whether they are "happy". I'm arguing that Visual Programming comes with some massive drawbacks. Whether people are aware of them or not is irrelevant. There's such a thing as being contentedly stuck in a local minima.

I believe that there are objective drawbacks (to both approaches actually). Whether you currently enjoy using them or not doesn't have much bearing on the point that things could be much better.
A good test would be uploading a translation of the Mein Kampf and ask for a detailed summary. Anyone wants to risk their Google account doing this?
Nah. Correction: Institutions try to preserve themselves. That's the goal. That's the root problem. Once you understand the power of that belief, the behaviour, the rhetoric, etc. all becomes much clearer. The bullshit much easier to cut through. The fact the problems don't get solved is a "side effect" to self preservation.
I don't understand the formal side of things, but I've used Y before, so here goes:

In the lambda calculus, functions are nameless. Recursion is when an expression refers to itself by name. The Y combinator gives you recursion despite the contradiction in my last two sentences.

> So what is the fixed point of f(x) = x + 1?

We don't have names, so what is the fixed point of (λx. x + 1)? Introduce a new variable into the expression's body to act as the expression's name, and also include it as the first parameter:

(λf x. x + 1)

(Your function did not refer to itself which is why there's no f in the body of the above expression).

Now let's take the ingredients and put them together. I'm including an 'input' so that we can converge on an output:

Y = (λg. (λh. g (h h)) (λh. g (h h)))
fixf = (λf x. x + 1)
input = 3

Y fixf input = (λg. (λh. g (h h)) (λh. g (h h))) (λf x. x + 1) 3

Now we just apply those lambdas to their terms and see what we end up with:

(λg. (λh. g (h h)) (λh. g (h h))) (λf x. x + 1) 3
^ | g |

(λh. (λf x. x + 1) (h h)) (λh. (λf x. x + 1) (h h)) 3
^ | h |

(λf x. x + 1) ((λh. (λf x. x + 1) (h h)) (λh. (λf x. x + 1) (h h))) 3
^ | f |

(λx. x + 1) 3
^ |x|

4
The first main example used here is dumb. The point wasn't that carpooling needed to go back to being inconvenient again, the problem is obviously that if you expand the definition of "carpooling" too much you get unlicensed and unregulated common carrier transportation companies that are effectively taxi or bus services with no oversight at all, and people could get killed.

Of course there's ways around that, and maybe the trade-offs are worth it. That's what the legislation concluded it seems. But the argument here is a strawman.
https://archive.is/R33RF

Subtitle: 'In the German philosopher’s conception, history was driven by inexorable forces in an upward spiral.'

The books reviewed are Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34417 and Hegel's World Revolutions by Richard Bourke https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691250182/he....
Intractable model error that's elemental to the approach won't get you any funding though.

Anthropomorphizing statistical learning is how you build a hype machine to cash out people with zero handle on the subject. See the comment below about "AI judges" and "true justice". Just like early electricity, all people see is magic.
I'm not sure how to tell the difference. As an interviewer, I'm decent at picking up subtle negative signals and there are people that I voted against that the rest of the team said yes to. And I have a 100% record of them quitting/being managed out in less than a year. But, there are other people I was pretty neutral on that turned out to be awesome. So that means I need to get better at interviewing and finding positive signals.

But I guess your comment about people who spend 9 weeks studying is exactly the people I'm not looking for. People who talk about how hard school was because they were "studying" all the time are the people who are working for the grade, not just doing stuff they love.

I know that talent and interest are not evenly distributed in the population. And if you actually are good at something you're interested in it's also vanishingly rare that it's something someone will pay you for. So I'm not trying to make the "if you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life" argument. I'm just saying, that there are people who are interested in something, they're also talented and do good work, and it's something that someone will pay for. Those are the people I'm looking for. It's unfair, but true.
of course we can. But why name it Shirky?
Is this an accurate representation of the GPT driver loop?

def generate(prompt: str) -> str:
# Transforms a string into a list of tokens.
tokens = tokenize(prompt) # tokenize(prompt: str) -> list[int]

while True:

# Runs the algorithm.
# Returns tokens' probabilities: a list of 50257 floats, adding up to 1.
candidates = gpt2(tokens) # gpt2(tokens: list[int]) -> list[float]

# Selects the next token from the list of candidates
next_token = select_next_token(candidates)
# select_next_token(candidates: list[float]) -> int

# Append it to the list of tokens
tokens.append(next_token)

# Decide if we want to stop generating.
# It can be token counter, timeout, stopword or something else.
if should_stop_generating():
break

# Transform the list of tokens into a string
completion = detokenize(tokens) # detokenize(tokens: list[int]) -> str
return completion

because that looks a lot like a state machine implementing Shlemiel the painter's algorithm which throws doubt on the intrinsic compute cost of the generative exercise.
Sounds like the author really likes their OOP. Nothing wrong with that but I hope the trivia is reflective of the job. I find programming to be mostly manual labor where common sense trumps many clever paradigms.
I don't think your statement is controversial at all, as I imagine climate change skeptics and vaccine safety skeptics to be largely overlapping sets of people.

The real issue in terms of rational decision making, in the US and elsewhere, is the formation of the correct group and the incorrect group for pretty much anything, and their corresponding echo chambers. It looks like this recommended book at least attempts to break away from this trend.
Also, about the non-determinism issue, there was a post some time ago and that comes from the way the GPU does the calculations, something something floating point something.

So of course the algorithm is deterministic, but the real-life implementation isn't.
Climate change + a massive waste of resources in general if all this ends up being good for is text summaries and cat pictures. Even automated text summaries and cat movies doesn't cut it.