skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huxley was talking about a time when most work was manual labor (tend the farm, smith the axe). While there was an intellectual element it was imbued into the physical aspect of the work. Today, work is more intellectual. It makes complete sense that pleasures are not so much so.

It's a great abstract discussion. Increases in technology have made it possible to use human intellect to move society forward, but also make pleasure that much easier to attain.

I don't really have a point here but I find the topic very amusing to think about. I feel guilty watching hours of TV during the week to unwind. At the same time, it helps me to relax. Pleasure that comes from physical work seems to always have a greater positive outcome for me. OTOH, mental pleasure sense to leave me depleted even more so. TV is an interesting mental pleasure that does help.
History (tldr): https://fleetdm.com/handbook/company#history

There’s also a podcast episode on it with two of the creators:
"The story behind the creation of osquery"
https://fleetdm.com/podcasts/the-future-of-device-management...
Gemini keeps disappointing me. It keeps making code up that is not accurate. I asked it some questions about a python library and the answers were inaccurate. I even instructed it to refer to the docs, but it still fails as Gemini made up methods that don't exist.

I also asked Gemini about git and that didn't go well either.
Because human time is expensive, and when this work is done uncompensated in the developed world, you don’t know it unless you’re in the situation.

I encourage you to make an attempt to deliver a cheaper model to understand the experience and the challenge. You either win or you learn. Find a senior care facility and volunteer for a week to understand the need.

https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/ltss/family-caregiving/valui...

https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2023/3/valuing-the...

> An AARP report from 2023 showed that the estimated economic value of uncompensated family caregiving was $600 billion in 2021, up from $470 billion in the previous study in 2017.

To note, this is estimated economic value of uncompensated. To understand the situation, you would need to add to this compensated care paid for by either Medicare or Medicaid in aggregate at the national level.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/national-health-exp...

> Nursing Care Facilities and Continuing Care Retirement Communities (4% share): Spending for services provided at freestanding nursing care facilities and continuing care retirement communities rose in 2022 by 5.6% to $191.3 billion, compared to a decline of 7.8% in 2021. Medicaid, out-of-pocket, and Medicare account for over three quarters of total payments to these facilities and, in 2022, spending for these payers had strong growth following low growth or reduced spending in 2021.

> Home Health Care (3% share): Spending for services provided by freestanding home health care agencies increased 6.0% in 2022 to $132.9 billion, accelerating from growth of 0.3% in 2021. Private health insurance, out-of-pocket, and Medicaid home health spending contributed to the faster growth, while Medicare spending growth for home health care services slowed.

So, we're at close to ~$1T in annual spend, very roughly speaking. At the same time, there is a constant shortage of CNAs and other folks who do this work, because the work is very hard and underpaid.

Labor shortage citations:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9894029/

https://www.ahcancal.org/News-and-Communications/Fact-Sheets...

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-21/proposed-...
From the article:

> No other industry builds a world designed to maintain a customer’s fantasy so that they continue to partake in an activity that, in the long run, advantages the house.

Videogames
A “working manager” usually has a higher chance of being a better manager. They are usually busy enough with their own work and they don’t have enough time for the management stuff.

A manager that only does management stuff? Well, what do you think they are going to do?

Also, managers that aren't proficient in the field they are managing also doesn’t usually work well and I thought was always disrespectful to the team.

Obviously there are exceptions to the above.
It would be shocking if there weren't dozens of former employees of each working at the others.

Employees per employer

Meta - 86,482

Google - 156,500

CIA - 21,575

FBI - 35,000

Dept of Defense - 747,809 (civilians)

Dept of State - 13,000

Large companies with global operations end up hiring people with backgrounds in security and geopolitics. They go to conferences apparently.

Concluding "the CIA's substantial control over online censorship" is a wild claim based on the evidence provided.
> Now life js unfair if you can't afford the latest iPhone.

Not once in my life have I heard anybody saying life is unfair because they can't afford an iPhone (or a ps5 or whatever expensive but dispensable good), except from children or teenagers.

But I have heard it from people who couldn't find jobs or had to work two jobs to barely make rent and couldn't plan to have children and raise kids. Or from people who couldn't afford an education at the right time to get their adult life on tracks.
I haven't published it nor have I seen it published.

I can copy paste some of my raw notes / outputs from poking around with a small model (Phi-1.5) into a gist though: https://gist.github.com/bluecoconut/6a080bd6dce57046a810787f...
A pass[0] extension called pass-otp[1] can produce otp codes from the command line

> pass edit git/hub
[... put in your totp ...]
otpauth://totp/GitHub/...

then you can

> pass otp -c git/hub
Copied OTP code for git/hub to clipboard. Will clear in 45 seconds.

pass-otp is also compatible with the passff firefox plugin; not sure beyond that.

[0]: https://www.passwordstore.org/

[1]: https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp
The energy use is the issue because fossil fuels supply the heat for the thermochemistry (like with most industrial processes). But direct solar heat could be used instead - this heat is supplied by concentrated solar thermal in a novel process

https://www.solarpaces.org/solar-pyrolysis-to-recycle-lithiu...
Neither of those hypotheticals seem that far-fetched. Maybe that's just the cynical side of me talking,

> The possibility for gatekeeping primary modes of information exchange is quite real, and quite worrying.

It's distressing today. The US intercepts an insane amount of communiqué - we knew about India's involvement in the Canadian Sikhist assassination before it happened. American-made electronics leak insurgent battle plans, tattle on domestic terrorists, enable modem-level attacks and who knows what else. The only reason you and I aren't threatened by it is the decorum required to operate an above-ground surveillance network.

No US company, especially at scale, can promise protection against the state for it's users. There's precious little anyone can do about it, nobody is selling an "alternative product" without state oversight.
Maybe inattention can help you spot things when you're super bored and casting about for stimulus. You might see something you wouldn't have otherwise? Very unscientific "Just So" opinion lol
Have you participated in a lawsuit or arbitration proceeding? I have, from both corporate and individual sides, and the one thing I can say is I'm glad I've never been named in a lawsuit. knocks on wood

If you have cash, public suits are great. You have a chance at setting precedent, get to make a PR splash and generally troll and embarass your opponent. If you don't have six+ figures of liquidity lying around, however, and your opponent does--and they know it--you're toast. They'll file for extraneous motions, launch counter-discovery: anything to rack up the legal bills. In most cases, it doesn't even advance that far. The motions and countersuits were disclosed, plaintiff's law firm asked their client for a six-figure retainer, client couldn't afford it and the issue went away. (With the client a few thousand, or tens of thousand, out of pocket or in debt, depending on whether they advanced from dicussing with counsel to hiring a litigator.)

Forced arbitration in cases of possible crimes, e.g. sexual harassment at the workplace or poisonous products, are a sham. They should be outlawed. But in cases of commercial contract disputes, they're--in my experience--a levelling agent for the little guy. The only people who seem to publicly launch missives against them are class-action attorneys (unsurprisingly, one of the most PR-savvy collections of counsel).

Maybe the middle ground is permitting a class exception to mandatory arbitration. But there is a reason large companies are removing arbitration as something you can force them into [1], largely in reaction to mass arbitration, which delivers arbitration's low-cost analogy to litigation in respect of class actions.

[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/amazon-drops-arbitra...
Heuristics, over time and quantity, beat intelligence more often than not, hands down. It's not a genre, it's a trend.
How Bob Moore, of Bob's Red Mill, Got Grocery-Store Famous
There's fixed compute per token but more tokens = more compute so a LLM will technically have more "time" for a query with more tokens preceding it.
> Just that it isn't the immediate transformer killer.

What is the best/stable-ish linear alternative for transformer right now? Especially for text generation and summarization.

We have domain specific ways of over sampling and search, so we much prefer less expensive models.
Travel-Advisory.info: Global Travel Advisories
I want to know more about your demographic profile.

The concept of having frequent time-ambivalent late night parties as an adult with a job is absurd to me.

Do you have a trust-fund? Are you in your 20s?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/style/bob-moore-bobs-red-...
It's really the whole package. The new Qualcomm chip is probably not that far, but having a whole machine designed from top to bottom with a closed system helps taking advantage of every bit.

The closest to that would have been the Surface line, but with Panos out I wouldn't bet on it.
He still has a history of over delivering compared to most (if not all). It’s his strategy to push push push with unrealistic expectations, and that’s how he over delivers.
A lot of comments here are pointing to specific causes such as microplastics and testosterone levels, prescriptions etc. Perhaps there's something to it, but gay/bi men specifically aren't slowing down, so this seems to be a uniquely straight issue [1]:

"In the post hoc analyses, an increase in sexual inactivity and having no sexual partners among men was observed in most sociodemographic subgroups but not among gay or bisexual participants..."

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Medical advancements such as the availability of PrEP have been a boon to the gay community, and it's paired with frequent STD testing.

Gay men are exposed to the same environmental hazards, and also have smartphones/social media, so I'm not convinced that's what been slowing down their straight counterparts.
This is especially true when I am actually a paying customer for the product. May be I should be given the controls to filter based on my own tolerance.
...what on earth gives you the impression...

I have been here nearly fifteen years. I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

I will let others decide if the entire community will, as usual, let someone assert that I am imagining things they know is fact or will for once back me up.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17728420/

Except kids.

Barbiturates were a problem for how many decades? How much over prescription were there of "mothers little helpers"? How about oxy? How many people did that kill? How about benzodiazepines? DO we even have accurate data on that, or did we just stop looking at the long term effects.

We're not studying the impact of over prescription of psychopharmacology. There is NO data on what happens if you give these drugs to people who DONT need them. Zero, None. And we would be very naive to think that we dont have that problem.

Edit: The only reduction in suicide rate of those taking SSRI's vs those getting a placebo is in the over 65 age group.
Bold title with and bold claims, but really little to get from the write-up itself than LinkedIn bios. However, I could add a question to the following quote:

> Is it merely a coincidence that censorship has increased aggressively since then?

Well, if you really have a foreign actor waging digital war at you, then what are your short-term options really?

I mean honestly, seeing what's happening around Europe and especially ex socialist countries, I can only confirm that the Putin regime wages a full-scale digital war towards European population. Why would that be different in the USA and why would it be bad to allow measures to be taken against it by working with Internet giants like Google and Meta?
> they claimed that attempts to subvert democracy are fascistic

> Where's the hyperbole?

Fascism was highly ideological – Mussolini wrote a whole book explaining his ideology – The Doctrine of Fascism - partially ghostwritten by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It contained specific doctrines, such as the primacy of the State.

While Nazism is often equated with fascism, it had a different ideological flavour, with a much heavier emphasis on race. Still, while the ideology was different, the strong emphasis on ideology remained – you can read all about it in Mein Kampf (I tried to read it once, it was so boring I fell asleep), in Hitler's speeches, in the works of his various acolytes.

Trump's ideology isn't fascism. Trump doesn't have an ideology. All he really believes in is his own personal power. Ideas aren't really that important to him. So, I'm not saying that various things he did weren't bad, but they weren't fascist. Calling them fascist is definitely inaccurate, and maybe even hyperbolic.
Stop paying for it, and use something else.
Every time OpenAI cuts a check for training data, an unlaunched startup dies
> Maybe it has some beef with Indian gov-t

You're anthropomorphizing the text completion engine.

Anyway, from the article:

> Gemini was asked whether PM Modi is a ‘fascist’, to which the platform responded that he has been “accused of implementing policies some experts have characterised as fascist,” which based on factors like the “BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology, its crackdown on dissent, and its use of violence against religious minorities”.

OK. This isn't even a story.
Just move to Proxmox or OpenShift, greed will kill many companies.
I don’t know what you think declarative means, but the example you’re showing is as non-declarative as it could be for such a simple thing.
Klarna's boardroom spat exposed a schism at Sequoia Capital
In the 90s, internet became popular with techies. It was built by technical people, mostly for technical people. Then, in the early 2000s, it grew to become a commerce platform next. It did not become pervasive as a town square until the smartphone era.
Or just use Logseq/Roam/Reflect/Obsidian etc
Those curves of "embedding displacement" are very interesting!

quickly scanning the blog led to this notebook which shows how they're computed and shows other examples too with similar behavior.
https://github.com/spather/transformer-experiments/blob/mast...
Today I got "wizard" on one of the levels! What does it mean?

My entire friend group and I love the game, thank you for making it <3
I've been in the industry a while now, and I remember when I was in high school in the late 90s getting into programming, people told me "don't go into computers, those jobs will be all outsourced to India in 5 years".

However, there have been multiple trends throughout the last 25 years of companies outsourcing more, then insourcing, then outsourcing, then insourcing. I will say for the current trend of outsourcing, it doesn't look like companies are moving everything offshore, it looks like they're being strategic about non core products/services.

My guesses for why:

1. Trends/Fads. Sure it didn't work last time, but enough time has passed that people forgot the mistakes and now the new management wants to try it again.

2. Software is more mature (?). Maybe with git, unit testing, better type systems, linters, cleaner architecture, modern frameworks, software without alot of churn, doesn't need the same level of talent to 'keep it running'.

3. Interest rates. Maybe when interest rates were lower, it made sense to spend 5x as much per engineer to get 50% (?) better quality.

4. Problem getting H1-B? I don't know if this is true at all, but I imagine with lots of layoffs at big tech companies, it may be harder to prove they can't find american engineers?
Unfortunately, "average human" is a very low bar.

For example, 100 is defined as the average IQ, but it's almost certain that every human who comments on HN has an IQ much above that.

It's also problematic when LLMs are better not because they're getting better, but the average human is declining.
I remember being absolutely fascinated by the ability of 1980s/early 1990s Japanese laptops to manage input with a standard keyboard. Especially given the computing resources of the time, it seemed like serious dark magic.
I like this concept under the premise of having an unlimited (or highly unconstrained) LLM manage the repository -- preferably locally hosted.

A simple dumb repository of notes is less interesting to me.
Google lost the AI race

Ironic considering they wrote the seminal paper on modern AI[0]. We’re going to look back on Google as the next Xerox PARC that squandered away massive and obvious advantages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need
It also reminded me of neocities which has a cat (neko) mascot.
I think it's kinda nice that my random identifiers have a little flag bit to indicate they were random v(._. )v

> their mixed endianess

Pardon my pedantry here but this is a misinterpretation of GUIDs through the lens of the UUID structure. The actual difference between GUID and UUID isn't the endianness-on-the-wire within the chunks but the number and sizes of the chunks themselves.

GUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, [8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8] bits].

UUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, 8 bits, 56 bits].

Endianness only matters with multi-byte data, so the "mixed-endianness" thing comes from the fact that the two specs mostly line up, but then people interpret GUID's array of octets as if ⅞ of it were a single multi-byte field as it is in UUID.

> or how version bits are placed in them

Indeed this is mostly lost to time and seems like odd placement these days. For anyone who's curious, the reason why those bits are where they are is because the Apollo Network Computing Architecture "version 0" UUIDs had a different third layout where the ninth octet indicated socket address family. IP's dominance led to the ossification of AF numbers which did not keep growing as anticipated, leaving several bits of effectively wasted space that were then reused to indicate the version since those bits could always be assumed to be 0 on NCA/NCS due to lack of any network standard on which they could be anything else.

Source: wrote a GUID/UUID library that implements all the old weird shit just for the fun of it:

irb> GlobeGlitter::from_gregorian_time.inspect => "#<GlobeGlitter 01eed42e-d812-1db0-0f52-00e04c180069>"
irb> GlobeGlitter::from_ncs_time.inspect => "#<GlobeGlitter 3cd0b18cbd50.02.00.00.e0.4c.18.00.69>"
OK, I've noticed that the pseudo-code above is vectorised, and so there's no recursion. The SSM function is actually described at the start of the paper, and an efficient hardware-aware implementation is suggested in section 3: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2312/2312.00752.pdf
A Metro (or maybe it was still A&P) in London, Ontario.
>> 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.

Obviously people are not fungible otherwise every country would look the same. If Croatians or Japanese want to preserve their culture, they will have to make their own babies, there is no way around it.
Python without dependencies will also work everywhere basically forever. Hell, most Python 2 is valid Python 3, but it's been over a decade now - Python 3 is the default system Python in most everything.
Yeah, thus spoke Zarathustra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WufKsOhkTL8

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJ8cAGm6JE
Great approach and great delivery; looking forward to the next video in the series!
Amazing answer.

I don't have this sort of experience with founders to validate the specific claim that it needs to be about more than you - to give you the reason to keep going.

But I do have my own personal life experience in general... I've been a pretty self centered person in my motivation throughout my life. But eventually I reached a point where my drive just dried up. A deep and persistant despair began to infect everything I tried to do. What was the point of it... even if I succeeded somehow, it was all just going to be more of ME at the end of it. And I was pretty sick of me.

Strangely, it was a cat that saved me. A neighbours cat I used to walk past in the mornings as it was enjoying a winter sunbeam. I'd give it an ear scratch which it appreciated greatly. And I realised that interaction was giving me more pleasure / amusement than any of the big, important projects going on in my life at the time. Making some thing's / one's life better - even in some small way - is the raison d'etre I was missing. It's so obvious and simple to me now - yet somehow I'd gone through half my life blind to it.

Now I call it: the principle of the cat. It gets a laugh out of people, when I tell them that story.
Dr. Gregory House's motto is "Everybody lies."

My fantasy is to create a hit TV series about an engineering firm and the motto is "Everything's a trade-off."
Would you feel even safer if they were monitoring phone calls, or any conversation that happened near a phone, for the communication of sentiments that might benefit our foreign adversaries?
Why won't a big player just bite the bullet and release "unsafe" models? The backlash can't be worse than creating crippled products that will be surpassed by competitors (from the US and the rest of the world). What additional risks would a free model add to something like Google Search?
> Regardless of the reason why you're giving up caffeine, you're best off gradually reducing your consumption vs. going cold turkey, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

This method never worked for me. I've stopped drinking coffee a few times in my life for a various reasons and cold turkey was the most effective method. Yes, there were headaches for a couple of days, but after that I felt great. I suppose it could've also just been that my attempt at gradual reduction wasn't steep enough.

On my reason for quitting coffee, t's exactly as the article states, we shouldn't become reliant on something, and for me, I could tell I was getting reliant on coffee due to the fact that if I ever missed my routine cup I would crash pretty badly.
That's the same with politicians, isn't it? The best people to run a country are those that know what they are doing, but usually tend to have a serious paying job, while in practice most people in places of power are career politicians - inept and removed from the real world.

The similarities of a company run by average MBAs and a country run by career politicians is a concept sadly not explored very much, for how topical and catastrophic it is.