skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is quite a dismissive stance, and I understand the context behind it: IQ was devised to measure broad population academic performance for schoolkids and has big flaws in how it measures that.

But it still has merit as another psychological test battery you can do to determine areas in which you may struggle to process information.

My working memory sucks [compared to the standard for my age range and demographic]. I've had access to stuff like RBANS (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status), through psychologist friends working in memory clinics. IQ tests correlate that finding, and are much more readily available (ie. free and not locked behind institutional firewalls).

Sure, the most thorough IQ tests are paywalled, but as a concept it's readily available online, though tests will yield you huge variation in scores.

We can choose not to treat IQ as a tool to compare ourselves to other people, but rather as a tool to identify our own strengths and weaknesses within different areas of the test. Ignore the single score at end of test, think on what felt hard, and performance in the score breakdown.

I would love to see more (better designed, statically rigorous) neuropsychological assessments become open and free to access. It would definitely have helped me growing up as an unknown AuDHD kid, to understand I really wasn't "a bright kid just making excuses for things I don't want to do".
I have often mused that, in some ways, it seems like the transistor is really being wasted in AI applications. We use binary states in normal computing to reduce entropy. In AI this is less of a concern, so why not use more of the available voltage range? Basically, re-think the role of the transistor and re-design from the ground up - maybe NAND gates are not the ideal fundamental building block here?
Thomas Sohmers on Microarch Club
The tech industry doesn't know how to distinguish between marginal and excellent workers or even between them and poor workers. Instead, they have hazing rituals that they know don't work but continue to not only use them, but expand them, perhaps in hopes that eventually if they're obnoxious enough, they will magically output the rock star employees instead of random quality employees.
> The comment submitted by Dave Taht, chief science officer of LibreQoS, argues that today’s applications are not typically bandwidth-limited, but are instead significantly limited by working latency.

(for reference, Taht's comment is indirectly linked from the submission; https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/12010651418616/1 which has much more detailed technical discussion.)

Dave Taht... that's the guy behind a lot of the bufferbloat work over the past decade or so (and seems to be the submitter?), right?

In my experience, predictable latency is more important than low latency. 50ms RTT can be fine for a video call; it's not fine if it spikes up to 500ms sporadically. Protocol work like QUIC that can reduce per-connection startup overhead definitely helps in this regard.

On the other hand, if you have a highly interactive use case like SSH where every single keystroke must roundtrip between you and a server, that 50ms RTT is very visible.

I think talking about absolute latency might be misguided in that it depends partially on the other end you're talking to. If I'm in the eastern US and communicating to a server in India, there's no way I'm getting < 100ms RTT (I'd be happy if I could get 200ms). On the other hand, if you're using legacy satellite internet like Viasat you might have 600ms latency talking to a server in the same city. (Starlink does better, but it still imposes sizable fixed latency costs on the order of 10s of ms.)

If I had to come up with latency metrics, I might initially suggest "< 20ms within the same city; loaded latency must not impose a penalty greater than 40ms" (I'd love for these numbers to be lower, but they're already very ambitious for Starlink due to physical characteristics of the satellite constellation).

edit: of course, in retrospect, that's my urban bias coming through -- what if you don't live in a city? or consider Hawaii -- is it good enough to just consider latency to Honolulu? Or do you want latency to www.google.com (the nearest frontends are in Los Angeles)?
I can confirm a PS4 controller tilt sensor works with yuzu, so fundamentally it's possible, not sure a plugin for parsing the steamdeck tilt sensor exists though
Linux's V4L2 VP9 Codec Kernel Code Rewritten in Rust for Better Memory Safety
I noticed this in Australia during the recent eclipse. It was only partial and fairly subtle in my location but the birds went into evening chorus and increased activity before resuming normal behaviour once the eclipse ended.
If I understand it correctly, this seems to be more than just quantizing, the models are apparently trained in this format as well. So it's possible that the many layers adjust themselves in a way that "cancels out" the inaccuracies of the lower bit count
Photon Detectors Rewrite the Rules of Quantum Computing
> How would you solve the problem of wealth concentration in free-markets without incurring in greater wealth concentration under a closed-market?

I'd have free market with punishingly progressive taxation and redistribute proceeds of this tax as a basic income.

> Because generally we want to reward and incentive the betterment of society.

Financial success is intrinsically rewarded and it's orthogonal to betterment of society. Tou can't really tell if a rich person improved society or damaged the society just by looking at their wealth. No additional rewards are necessary. And some pubishement would be advisable if the scale of this success causes harm to the system that spawned it.

> But the thing is that those that reach 10 million or plus will always have the option to move their fortunes abroad, so it's the middle class that ends up paying the heavier burden in countries ruled by this mindset.

The mere presence of those who have more than $10mln is the cause of the system collapsing. They price out the middle class out of the real estate that they hoard for investment purposes. And of other limited resources as well.

Rich are more than welcome to leave. Their leaving improves lives of everyone else.

Owning money just means that society owes you some goods and services.

If you move out and request that some other country pays this debt to you then the country of your origin is better of.

Wealthy can be beneficial to capital starverd countries because their people can trade the wealthy low tech services to amass capital necessary to buy technologies from abroad.

So to help african countries we shouldn't be sending them food. We should cast away our billionaires there.
I think that this anecdote [0] is appropriate for showing the glaring disconnects that can exist in the human<-->system symbiosis.

[0]: https://www.controlinmotion.com/news/news-archive/a-little-h...
> Those are entirely different orders of magnitude both when it comes to size and how much usefulness you lose. In modern storage backends like Victoriametrics a counter gonna cost you around byte per metric per probe. And as you emit them periodically, that is essentially independent of incoming traffic

I thought this argument was about whether wide events can be used for metrics or metrics is a completely different concept.
If we want to emulate metrics in events, we would also make them periodically independently of the traffic. Like emit them once in a while. Pretty much like Prometheus scraping works
Why is an assembly line needed for a type of computer that has never done a useful calculation?
I can't speak for you, but it's really not too difficult to host some static content on a VPS. At the very worst, the VPS is compromised somehow, and you refresh it from the admin panel.
Yes. To lazy to cite, especially as the article was German and written for Switzerland, however the point was that even a badly organized delivery route and same day delivery is in most cases more efficient than driving a 5 or 10 minute distance.
It's only the second time in history that a lobbying entity is banned. Second time since Monsanto in 2017. That's not a "path". Source: the first paragraph of the article.

This has nothing to do with "show trials". If you hold 14 lobbying badges and do not respect the European Parliament's Employment Committee's repeated requests to discuss important matters of employment in the European Union, then Amazon is really showing contempt for the lawmakers and the European institutions.

It's very understandable why they are talking about a "red line" here: If a company of the size and importance of Amazon refuses to sit down with lawmakers and discuss problems caused by their commercial activities on a European-wide scale, then they're not showing the kind of social and political responsibility that's fair to require from a corporation with direct access to European lawmakers.

The decisive body seems to agree:

> all quaestors were in favour of authorising the secretary general to withdraw their long-term access badges

There's more detail here:

https://www.politico.eu/article/amazon-lobbyists-face-ban-fr...
https://euobserver.com/digital/158150
> The LLaVA model tells me that it can not generate images since it is a text based AI model.

Because it can't generate images, it can only describe images provided by the user.
The service was announced by Fastly in supplier communication. I’d post the message here, but it’s got a big “Confidential - subject to NDA” message at the top. But I don’t think I’m breaking NDA by saying that it’s available.
Yeah I was gonna say: how many refunds did it offer?
Learn to Read Chinese in Eight Minutes (2013)
They do this all the time in sub-tropical locations. Cooler moist air from the ocean brings clouds which dissapate over the hot dry land.

Mostly you don’t see it because clouds change at just the right pace for us not to notice them changing.
afaik it's still debatable whether they are seperate species.

maybe just a semantic thing.

i think they are just one of the earlier waves of migration out-of-africa altough 99% the same as us outside of some physical adaptations.
As I've gotten older I've noticed things that used to just come to me(simple things, like compound boolean statements) now require thought. In addition,I take a lot longer to ingest new info and reason about it.

To work around this, I rely more on social skills, a positive attitude, pre-canned responses, and deferral of judgement on technical approaches until I've had time to consider them. (Fortunately my social brain hasn't aged as poorly as my nerd brain)
I consider the distinction between unit and integration test useless. The important part is tests give me confidence that my system is working, or if not working I can quickly find the problem. I don't care if the bug is in my code or in some third party code, I care that there is a bug. More than once the bug was because the third party code works different from what I expected, but mocks only tell me that if the code works as I expect then my code works - which isn't very good.

Fast tests are important. However I find that most integration tests run very fast if I select the right data. I can write unit tests that run very slot if I select the wrong data. I find that the local filesystem is very fast and so I don't worry about testing it (I place my data in a temporary directory - the problems with temporary directories are about security which I don't worry about in unit tests). Likewise I find that testing with a real database is fast enough (my DB is sqlite which supports in-memory databases - not everyone can work with a real database in that way). Which is to say you should challenge your assumptions about what makes a test slow and see if you can work around them.
Awesome to see that KDE Connect will finally support Bluetooth! Just to be clear, has this backend been added to the Android app or is this a Linux-only feature? I remember being told once that there were limitations (perhaps in Google Play?) preventing the release of a Bluetooth backend.
"Low-noise balanced homodyne detection with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors" (2024)
https://opg.optica.org/opticaq/fulltext.cfm?uri=opticaq-2-1-... :

> [...] A pertinent example of continuous variables comprise the quadrature representation of the optical quantum state, as opposed to the discrete-variable photon-number representation. The wave-like nature of the field results from the coherence between different photon number components of a field with uncertain photon number. Therefore, to study the wave-like nature of the field, one must be able to measure superpositions of photon number states.

> To do so, the field of a weak optical quantum state (signal) comprising a few photons interferes with the field of a bright coherent state (i.e., a local oscillator, LO) on a balanced beam splitter. The two output modes of the beam splitter are then measured with two photodetectors. By calculating the difference between the detector count rates, which is proportional to the field quadrature at a reference phase provided by the local oscillator, the optical quantum state can be characterized [3–5]. The ability to characterize optical quantum states in their phase-space representation [1] makes homodyne detection an essential tool for quantum information processing with continuous variables [6].

> Typically, conventional semiconductor photodiodes are used as the detector in balanced homodyne detection. The high optical flux arising from the LO lifts the optical signal above the electronic noise floor, which is typically in the pW√Hz range at telecommunication wavelengths. As a result, the generated carriers in the photodiode can be integrated over a characteristic response time, resulting in a photocurrent which is proportional to the incident optical flux [7]. For BHD, it is essential that the photodetector output is directly proportional to the intensity (photon flux) of the input light. In this case, we refer to the detector output as linear.
Um, not sure if you’re joking or just young, but you have heard of this thing called Unix, right?
I think 0 "doesn't count", since you don't have to add or subtract anything for it, just mask it out.
That's intentional, not really a technology limitation. Just like bad in person service is not really a limitation of the agents, it's company policy.

The goal of customer service is usually to avoid helping customers. "AI" is better at that than people because it doesn't have feelings. So people give up trying to get a resolution, metrics go up, and the world gets a little worse.

It's not an AI issue, it's a neo-feudal post capitalism issue.
Powers of 3 don't pack well into binary memory...

A 1 bit multiplier in silicon is a single logic gate, but a ternary decoder to decode a packed tri-state 'weight' is bigger.

I therefore suspect that this method will be extended to make all weights simple 1 or 0 (ie. Binary). Perhaps that will be done by having half the weights have 1 or 0 values, while the other half are -1 or 0.
I actually knew someone who had a valve like that installed because her CSF pressure kept changing. Periods of high pressure were the most dangerous and led to rapidly deteriorating mental function—and eventually death.

The valve never really worked well, and she didn’t live long enough to determine why.
Oops, you're right, I always mix up the terms for those; I did mean sensitive though, which I hope was possible to figure out from what I said after.
have a look here: https://lowendstock.com/ ... mine is hosted in Russia... but I don't believe all Russians are bad because of a war.

I have had good luck so far on this site for my last 3 VPS', but check the ratings, I guess.
I’ve found chat gpt very reliable for helping with coding tedium and avoiding typing. For example, I wanted to refactor 10 or so to tests with repetitive setup to a single parameterized test, all I needed to do was paste in the tests and ask. It’s also great for writing simple happy path tests for code you give it.
Stockholm was cold this winter and I would not say we are very northern.
Quantized 7B LLMs should work fine on your machine, though maybe you’re talking about speed?
Investors are not making waves with PR announcements but this is where a lot of the PE/VC space is talking and heading. How can we unlock more productivity with fewer heads by using AI. Its quite similar to the Klarna story, reduce headcount and increase productivity. Even ignoring my comments, its quite easy to see how AI can multiply an individual engineer, that is naturally going to be applied at scale by investors.
Again, if we are considering the original comment I replied to about medium-term vs long-term, a move offshore to Mexico will always make sense in the long-term unless Mexican labour becomes as expensive as USA.

Considering break even points it will always make sense to move out, reasons to not move are the local incentives in the form of tax breaks and invested capital in factories, if the consideration is only about labour (which the take on unions making it easier for the move) it always make sense to move, regardless if it's a unionised workforce or not. Non-unionisation only delays this inevitability by allowing the company to milk the employees for a little longer, in the long-term it will eventually pack up and move if the incentives are not maintained (again in the form of tax breaks or if the company has recently re-invested in existing facilities).

To me, again, the fear of globalisation's side-effects is not a good excuse to promote a lack of worker solidarity, it only makes workers more powerless since at some point in the long-term the break even point is reached, without an union there's no collective force to pushback a company's decision to move their production somewhere else with cheaper labour, at least with an union there will be a conversation and negotiation around it.
This is why powershell is so much better than bash or alternatives. Just convert any data type to object and work with it using common syntax. No need to learn 300 different syntaxes/parameters for different parsers like jq/xmlstarlets/etc.
I'm not talking about static content.

I need the whole enchilada: DB, Web Server, Dynamic Languages, etc. Also, for a shipping, production application, with hundreds of users; where privacy and security are of paramount importance.

It's easy, sure. It's easy to create an insecure server, that can be pwned. I know of which I speak. I have done just that.

"A man who holds a cat by the tail, learns a lesson he can learn in no other way."

- Mark Twain
I'm a mechanical engineer. I design physical products in the consumer goods market. Only one of your points even makes sense to me (As in - yes, I know what the tab key does) but that doesn't impact my daily life because my editor takes care of that for me.

On the other hand, I'm able to use python to perform tasks that would take my team of engineers/designers weeks to accomplish. I'm able to automate documentation and import/export/convert various files to enable collaboration in a way that even the most diligent engineer wouldn't have time to keep up with.

In short, python allows me to single handedly enable my team to operate at a level that wouldn't be possible otherwise. And I'm able to do this in small chunks, allowing the code to leave my mind while I go back to my "real job", while still being simple to come back to weeks/months later and modify/extend as needed.

It's a game changing programming language, and I'd never have been able to accomplish any of that if it wasn't designed to be as simple (yet fully functional) as possible.
when can we expect the first ~100+ million parameter models to run on raspberry pi Pico?
I predict there's going to be a new business model of tricking AI bots into saying what you want them to say, but doing so in ways that a judge will still accept as "the bot said it" not "you were obviously trying to trick the bot".

Meanwhile, judges have experienced the past decade of absolutely useless bots that companies use to avoid having to talk to customers, and this will make the judges rather unsympathetic to this approach, so I expect more fun decisions.
I'd be very surprised if Apple can put something on the level of GPT4 on a handheld. Remember, GPT4 is estimated to be around 1.7 trillion parameters. That's 3.4TB at 16 bit and it would still be ~340GB at 1.58bits. The best we can hope for is a low-ish level few billion parameter model. Which would still be cool on a phone, but as of today these models are nowhere near GPT4.
> Sadly, not all of us have the privilege of working with codebases like SQLite's, which go much beyond 100% line/statement coverage[1]...

Linked SQLite page mentions this:

> 100% branch test coverage in an as-deployed configuration

Branch test coverage is different from line coverage and in my opinion it should be the only metric used in this context for coverage.

90-95% line coverage is exactly why many unit tests are garbage and why many come up with the argument "I prefer integration tests, unit tests are not that useful".
That applies in both directions and that was a response to someone saying it was warm in Copenhagen. I definitely do not doubt climate change but a warn winter in Copenhagen or a cold one in Oslo/Stockholm isn't climate, that is weather.
It's tough, it's also part of the reason so little is done here, just compare the size of market capitalization of say DAX40 (German top 40) or CAC40 (French top 40):

DAX40 $1.9T

CAC40 $2.8T

There are single companies in US that exceed both of these values.
Rather than visual noise, it makes comments sections immediately recoognizable as such. Think of page-long comments containing code samples. The tool support is trivial, and you can always run a simple regex to fix it up.

Line comments in general have the advantage that they can be trivially nested, and the nesting be immediately recognizable as such. For any new programming language, I would only support line comments, for that reason.
snaps and flatpaks are focused more distribution and are "sandboxed" (quotes because their are security issues with them). NixOS breaks compatibility with existing programs unlike gobo, but NixOS's package repository is exponentially better maintained where gobo's is incomplete and years out of date.

All of these are all still behind how Android stores apps. On Android each application can be distributed using a single file that is easy to distribute. Each application is properly sandboxed. Each application gets its own directory. And something all of the other things mentioned here are missing, each application gets its own subdirectories in the app's directory for storing its state (there are different ones for each user).
Not my experience at all… I learn faster at 40 than I did when I was younger. I don’t feel like anything is slower, plus I have the decision-making ability to actually do things efficiently as unappealing as that initially is.
The theoretical capacity of a binary network is 69% of the capacity of a full-weight network, so it makes sense that LLM would converge to 1-bit networks in the long term.

It's nice to finally see practical networks reach the theoretical limits found in the statistical mechanics of Ising models. A good pointer to efficient 1-bit training, from the statistical mechanics point of view, is here:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0700324104
Is that new (relative to some previous point in time)? They don't have my card details.
Welcome to capitalism? They’ll need to retrain at their own expense. Hopefully they’ve saved enough to provide shelter, food, and health insurance for any dependents they may have acquired along the way. The destruction part of creative destruction is that pretty rough.