skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Calling their beliefs delusional is not a neutral description of the features of their beliefs, but a judgement that, if they hold those beliefs, then they lack the capacity to produce and share knowledge.

Hardly! I know plenty of conspiracy believing nutjobs who could teach me a thing or two about cooking or even philosophy.

> we can stop assuming that they are where agency goes to die

Being willing to listen to just about anyone, yet filter what I want for myself does not mean I have taken away their agency. It just means I don't trust their every word, and rightfully so. That's basically the definition of being rational.

Those with authority may say or do agreeable things I know to be false in subtle or not so subtle ways. I know their authority does not come from individuals, but crowds. I'm either in or out. The ones with the least agency are the rest of us who care more about truth than clout.

I think this article was interesting, but misguided. Crowds are ephemeral and already made up their minds long before anyone they gave authority was before them. They're not going to be convinced by mere opinion pieces. Their beliefs came from their own thoughts validated by others and long before anyone embodied it. This validation process is often random and meaningless. What matters more is that enough people arrived at the same thoughts independently and usually from gentle suggestion building off previous authority. Filling that void by becoming that icon is how most con artists operate, and great artists steal.
...and the real question is, for how long will it remain available?
And here we are saying AI won’t take jobs.

It’s different than industrialization.

The definition of AGI is - do what humans do, but better.

This will only exacerbate over time.
> Isn't this just wrapping existing agents with a "secure" coding environment?

It is. The paper has this paragraph where autodev requires rules for it's setup.

> The user initiates the process by configuring rules and actions through yaml files. These files define the available commands (actions) that AI agents can perform. Users can leverage default settings or fine-grained permissions by enabling/disabling specific commands, tailoring AutoDev to their specific needs. This configuration step allows for precise control over the AI agents’ capabilities. At this stage the user can define the number and behavior of the AI agents, assigning specific responsibilities, permissions, and available actions. For example, the user could define a ”Developer” agent and a ”Reviewer” agent, that collaboratively work towards an objective.

Their example is very simple as well, and the code generated does not cover the usecase where the sentence might have `I'm` or `I've`. I feel that the tool would generate a template with missing logic and then the overhead falls on the developer to figure it out and then add them (since this entire process is automated).

The original comment is just farming upvotes from the `AI hype` people on HN. It's become quite common with gangs of users upvoting each other and downvoting any other narrative that does not fit into their `AI` world.

> Does this represent a meaningful improvement in AI?

It seem more like setting up a factory using a LLM and then making it generate other factories.
Not really.

It partially helps but in the article I mention the package it had a change, a minor (non-breaking) one, that caused A to affect B without us having a direct explanation as to why.

Locking helps on packaging, it reduces the problem of packages being updated without your control but it doesn't help interdependency or the other things I mentioned (not even talking about security here)
I found that “harmful content” to actually be content that could cause bad PR for the LLM company.

I doubt someone could actually make counterfeit money following a LLMs instructions, because the model only generates plausible sounding text. It likely doesn’t have technical details of banknote manufacturing in its training data. The example given was laughable. Get paper. print money. Launder it.
> the better approach here is to just shift the incentives.

Yes!

> Start funding replication

No :( That won't solve the problem, it'd just change shape. Funding people who produce fraudulent or incompetent papers won't stop being a problem if you ask them to produce a slightly different kind of paper. You just get fraudulent replications, fraudulent claims of failure to replicate, fraudulent rebuttals to claims of failure to replicate and so on.

The other thing this would do is sharply shift the distribution of papers towards those that are guaranteed to replicate, either because they prove things that are trivially true or because they prove things about simulated worlds that may or may not be connected to reality. Both categories of paper are already way too popular, nobody needs more.

Unfortunately, the incentives fix for this problem is so blindly simple it's also difficult to bring up in polite company, because lots of people have an allergic reaction to the implications. Look at places where science is being done at scale without replication crises or widespread fraud, and notice what's different about the incentives. Then ensure science is always done with those incentives.
I can’t tell if Snapdragon’s Elite branding is supposed to be the same as Apple’s Pro. If that’s the case, then comparing it to a base M3 is not appropriate.
Meta Velox: A C++ vectorized database acceleration library
I'm not sure what your point here is. If GP is right, and crime rates don't go down... then it seems that motivation doesn't really go down all that much either?
"Harmful" has really become a ridiculous word in my lifetime.

In Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone it mentions how MIT professor/Black Jack card counting/Hedge Fund manager Edward O. Thorp spent a period as a kid building pipe bombs and various chemical explosives for fun.

That is what I could consider a harmful activity.

To pretend ASCII art can be harmful strikes me as the thoughts of someone with paranoid delusions. Someone completely detached from reality that probably needs medication.
I don't think people are, yet, deliberately creating predictive machines because they see that as the path to intelligence. Things like ChatCPT are LLMs, born out of that (language model) line of research, where the goal has been to learn the rules of language. The fact that a language model, when made large enough, appears somewhat intelligent was an unexpected surprise.

Different species have evolved to have different capabilities. Humans have evolved to be generalists, able to survive in a huge variety of environments, which requires a high degree of adaptability. The key to adaptability is prediction - the ability to very rapidly (in space of minutes/hours/days - not evolutionary timescales) learn how things work in a new environment or in new conditions.

Not all animals need this degree of adaptability, since they have been able to survive and thrive in long-lasting stable environments. Examples might be crocodiles or sharks - very low intelligence, but great at what they do. Evolution is not generally about prediction or intelligence - it's about optimizing each species for their own environment(s).

We already know how to build machines that are more like crocodiles - great at doing one thing over and over, but now we have the capability and desire to also build machines that are generalists like ourselves, and that requires us to figure out a way how to implement intelligence. Given how hard a problem this has been (and continues to be) to solve, it makes sense to look at our brains for inspiration - where does our own intelligence come from, and it's highly notable that the part of our brain that most differentiates humans from other animals - our large neo-cortex - appears to be a prediction machine ... In studying humans no-one is saying that other animals are the same - it's just that humans are the animal who's capabilities we are trying to reproduce.

As I said, LLMs being intelligent was an accidental discovery - they were expected just to be language models, but it's certainly notable that the only thing they are trained to do is predict next word. They only do one thing, predict, and they exhibit unexpected intelligence, hmmm ...

At this point people are NOT yet all saying "prediction is the key to intelligence, so let's build predictive machines and assume they will be intelligent", but when you look at our cortex and look at LLMs, that does appear to be the obvious direction.
Yeah it has some minor academic interest but the idea of these exploits leading to something "harmful" is hyperbole to say the least.

An interesting starting point would be to show that an uncensored LLM could synthesize knowledge that isn't already easily available to provide realistic instructions that could be followed by a non specialist without access to controlled anything to make or do some bad thing.
I agree, and I’m thrilled about it. I love programming but while I’ve had bouts of enjoyment coding “in the small”, it’s my least favorite part. I love systems and software architecture, and seeing things come to life above all else. ChatGPT is greatly improving my enjoyment of it all.

I also doubt traditional programming languages are going anywhere in the short term, seeing there are trillions of lines of code for critical systems in the wild. Good luck replacing that in a few years only, or fully delegating its maintenance to Devin.
Not sure where the data is actually stored, but assuming the last version is stored in the cloud, how can they prevent users from sharing data e.g. music though the docs? And how can they they stop users from doing that?
"The shocking speed of progress on AI"

Not sure what is shocking. Some of us used Codex in 2021 and nothing has changed since that has revolutionised software development by any capacity. Feels like people are just saying whatever some tech CEO or worse, some guru says.

Progress isn't some infinite exponential either where you can just keep increasing the capacity of models and expect better results. Also not sure where they are going to get better training data when they already polluted the internet with AI generated data.
Hypermiling Is Motorsport – Just Not the Kind You're Used To
it's a business thing, not a legal thing, when someone blows themselves up with a home made IED you want to avoid the PR backlash. Companies have self-censored for this reason since forever.
Getting WASD and Space instructions on mobile too...
Replicating MySQL: A Look at the Binlog and GTIDs
It goes along with "safety". The point is that something becomes important and is agreed upon as worth attention so then suddenly people adopt that terminology to push their agenda through. See also bullying, human rights, etc.
Thanks for reading it! It's the first one to get comments on my blog lol.

Yes we did use lockfiles, all over the place. However each service had a different (and mandatory) security update that modified the libraries with a non-breaking change.

From now on I will try to establish a fixed policy although given the frequency of updates in the ecosystem it will become deprecated rather quickly
iPhone 1 was way more successful than Vision Pro, and it didn't suck relative to what was on the market at the time. At launch, Steve Jobs famously said it was 5 years ahead of the competition, and contemporary commentators generally agreed.

In its first week, Apple had sold 270,000 iPhones domestically.[47] Apple sold the one millionth iPhone 74 days after the release.[48] Apple reported in January 2008 that four million were sold.
For libraries, the article shows most of the time being spent in "front end" phases. Isn't that a bit misleading, as the library will eventually have to be included in the final program's binary? The code generation phase isn't exactly attributable to any one module.
Mozilla is funded by Google. Mozilla doesn't seem to have much of a clue what it ought to be doing, either. I use Firefox, but I wouldn't trust anything else to last unfortunately.
Digital Nomads can't afford the tourist rates (100Euros/night?), but they are soaking up some of the market for higher end long term rentals and monthly rentals. There aren't actually that many of them though, relative to tourists and locals, and mostly they are looking to arbitrage cost of living, so can be quite cost conscious.
This is correct. I use GPS in RC planes and only the initial sync is that slow (when it has to download the ephemerides). Subsequent boots/syncs only take a few seconds, and you obviously get great resolution with just the GPS unit.
It is incredibly hard and expensive to make realistic counterfeit money. The limiting factor is not the lack of instructions from an AI chatbot. The printing presses and plates cost tens of thousands of dollars. There is only one legitimate source of the paper that only sells to the US government. Finding the appropriate combination of fibers and an unscrupulous supplier to order it from is not something the average person is going to do.

The episode was actually really interesting. The level of detail and thought that the guy put into it could have easily made him successful at a legal enterprise. And still he got caught!
You can disable Secure Boot on at least some of the existing Snapdragon-based ARM PCs already.
The tough sell for me is why would I want a product that makes it easier for me to manage and add even more overpriced cloud services. I have similar feelings on kubernetes. Without kubernetes, we have a strong incentive to keep the number of machines low (like Stack Overflow). I want to pay for something that makes my life easier and cheaper.
What service can replace this in microG? Most Android ROM relies on it for location services :(
I agree publicly funded research should not be siloed in anyway and should be in the public domain.
I agree that these benchmarks don’t mean as much anymore because it’s highly likely they were already present in the training set, but also believe it’s likely these tools will be significantly better in a few research cycles
I can also recommend "The Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul [0], which argues that technique (not just machines) is at odds with human autonomy and freedom. It seems paradoxical at first, given all the possibilities introduced by technology since the 50's. Are we not more free than ever before?

Then again, considering what surveillance capitalism is doing to us today, it is hard to deny that we are constantly nudged into certain grooves by algorithms that is fed massive amounts of our own fine grained behavioral data.

We crave autonomy, freedom and individuality. We often feel that we are unique and free. But zooming out, most of us are heavily formed by the environment around us, which nowadays consist of a lot of screen time and exposure to ads and content picked by algorithms, influencing many of our choices.

It's an interesting perspective to ponder, that's for sure!

[0] https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
Scientific knowledge is contingent, things should be presented as our best theories to fit to the known evidence.

When the evidence changes, so should the theories.

I am only ever critical of the process when the above does not happen, or when people refuse to look for new evidence when it's reasonable for them to do so.
JWT confirms something is seriously wrong with our understanding of the universe
The chatbot is a reflection of the entity that hosts it. See for example the judgment against Air Canada. The cost to host a chatbot to the public is significant so most of these will be hosted by a large corporation.

Therefore the corporation hosting the chatbot expects the chat bots speech to be “aligned” with its corporate image. Chatbots are not public goods. The sources you mentioned have their own editorial styles and the anarchist cookbook is a reflection of the values of its author just as much as chatgpt is a reflection of OpenAI’s.

I like diversity and this is one of my concerns is we basically turn the information ecosystem into the mental equivalent of grey goo due to the proliferation of mundane, inaccurate AI generated content.
I think one specific development we might see would be an end of the SaaS micro tool era.

Possibly, but if SaaS tool providers make APIs so AI tools can consume the data, that would open up a huge ecosystem of AI 'plugins' that would be immensely valuable. I think OpenAI have something like that already.
What year did you last use GPS, it’s even usable deep within cities now. Modern devices use GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, and various regional ones too. Locking on is super fast and it’s hard to lose unless you walk inside of a big building. I can even get a good GPS lock inside my house, it’s really good these days.

You’re right that it can use more power, but it’s really not that bad with modern hardware.
I’m of the opinion that delusional beliefs are a natural consequence of creativity and imagination.

There may yet be a correlation beteeen genius and madness.

Take Tesla’s Wardenclyffe experiment. Assuming we don’t believe he would have succeeded, it was a delusional dream. He had spent his life thinking radically and having it align with reality, so he didn’t doubt his hunch about wireless power.

Perhaps delusional thoughts are a result of accurate guesses growing up which don’t compensate for mental faculty decline. This brings fear and defensive attitudes and ultimately leads to a thick headed belief that is static.
"As agreed upon in the 90s"? What agreement is that?

AIUI ① none of the new members of NATO agreed to not apply, ② all of them applied after a solid majority of the voters in that country was in favour of applying, and ③ none of the old NATO members agreed to turn down anyone's application. What have I missed?
That’s amazing that he was caught.

AFAIK in most states, the police have say in their jurisdiction. So a lot of theft crime can’t be caught because the thief drives to another jurisdiction and the chase can’t go on.

So they can get away.

That being said unlike Seattle and San Francisco, Florida cops don’t fuck around. At-least on Polk county, the are tough on crime.
All. Every single arm64 desktop machine supports disabling UEFI Secure Boot.
Private BitTorrent Tracker Generator
I agree. Unless you are a high value target, the spambots are going to be rather unsophisticated. e.g. most don't even run javascript.
Dumb question perhaps but what specifically are the multiple “VoiceAI” platforms being referred to here?
Aren't there two arguments for why this is bad?

- db will generate new plans as necessary when row counts and values change. Putting in hints makes the plan rigid likely leading to headaches down the line.

- as new Postgres comes out, it's planner will do a better job. Again forcing specific plan might force the planner into optimization that no longer is optimal.

In my experience developers almost never comeback to a query with hints to double check if hints are really needed.

Famously oracle has query hints that don't do nothing no more, that are ignored, but oracle can't remove them from query language because that would break too many existing queries.

I like Postgres stance that if query planner doesn't do a good job, then dba should first update table/column statistics, and if things are truly bad, submit but to Postgres so the query optimizer can be updated itself.

Saying all that, hints support through an extension to Postgres is a good compromise. Postgres developers don't need to bother with hints, its a third party feature. And dba/users, if they really need hints, now they have them.
Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted
Ask HN: Suggest me books in your language
I'm a polyglot and I love to read. Any genre is fine - Non Fiction/ Fiction.
Also, English is not excluded.
There's a simple test: Do we have less of more illustrators now than we had in 1816 (quick Wikipedia lookup for when the camera was invented)? We should probably adjust this for total population, i.e. compare the percentage of illustrators. I don't have the numbers, but my gut feeling would be it's a lot higher now than it was back then.

The fallacy is thinking that humans only do work somebody needs, and that our needs are static. Turns out they evolve, sometimes in quite unexpected and even hilarious ways. Humanity seems to have a predisposition for keeping everyone busy.
Really looking forward to OpenRA2 and OpenDawnOfWar!
The Linux Desktop Is Finally Great (Both Ubuntu and Firefox)
interesting details, thanks!

To me this sounds more like a "microservices nightmare"?

What do you mean by "the service had a mandatory security update" (paraphrased)?

I'm guessing you are talking about updating packages because of warnings from "npm audit"? Or do you mean an update of some top-level package? Container image??

Anyway, update is update.

And Software tied to cloud services can always be brittle. Why no complaint about Amazon breaking semver (if the mentioned missing function was part of the public API), or the package that was breaking (if it was not)?

How would that be prevented by using C#?
What is cool about Postgres extensions ecosystem, is that new functionality can be built upon existing extensions. For example, Babelfish (SQL Server compatibility layer for Postgres) uses pg_hint_plan to implement Transact-SQL hints support [1]. This is really useful, because existing queries, that were optimized for MSSQL, may require tuning when moved to Postgres/Babelfish, and it is great to have additional knobs for tuning.

[1] https://github.com/babelfish-for-postgresql/babelfish-for-po...
yes, you’re making my point. The companies that excel at this technology are the same ones that are dominating the general computing space.

Edit: but point taken, we could go down the rabbit hole forever. Definitely not as cut and dry as I was making it out to be
This could have been written about any language, even "serious" ones. Yes, JavaScript the language and ecosystem have many issues, some of which are fundamental flaws. But the kind of nightmare the author experienced can happen in any project where you're pulling in dependencies, software that other people wrote.

Nothing can be 100% reliable and stable when your house is built from parts which other people are changing all the time. What helps: testing, locking to specific versions, reducing your dependencies. But that's not specific to JavaScript, that's pretty much the entire house of cards which we call software development.

Edit: Somewhere else I saw the phrase, "cultural problem". That describes the situation with JavaScript and the reason for the author's hellish journey debugging an issue introduced by indirectly updating an obscure dependency. But culture can be improved, and it has been evolving to be more serious about reliability.

Will we ever awake from the nightmare of history? I mean, JavaScript? No, it's part of our legacy now: as the article described, JavaScript code is running all over the globe, including enterprise-scale, important and serious things. We have to work from within the system to reform it. And probably gradually replace it with WASM, for better or worse.
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No. Peer review is an established process in which the editor chooses usually two to four expert peers who review the paper. It is double blinded to reduce bias.

It is also not the point of peer review to judge the correctness of the theory. Reviewers check relevance, novelty, plausibility, consistency, overall correctness of methodology. "I think this is wrong" is not something an editor would accept as an argument not to publish. That's something you can write in a new paper. And I don't think Hossenfelder would like to see it not published just because she thinks it's wrong.