skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If anything, declaring location of manufacture by the location of the corporate headquarters rather than the factory obfuscates very valuable information, arguably to the point of misleading marketing.

There is value in easily learning that the majority of Toyotas sold in the US are American cars, that almost all computers (desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets) are Chinese or Taiwanese, and so on.
I live in Sweden where most forests are natural, isn't that hard to make those either. Just do nothing with a piece of land and a ton of trees starts to grow, it is hard to not get trees every year you have to go and pull all the new small trees that started growing if you don't want a forest, not sure how it could be hard to plant such forests.
Consciousness is ill defined in humans or anything else. To me a more interesting question would be "Does the Sun contain exotic life?" E.g. as plasma life forms.

Life can be defined as simply as a self-sustaining, localized, organized structure that uses energy and information to reverse the natural flow of increasing in the environment. The sun has ample supply of energy and information bandwidth (physical phase space) so I personally would not be at all surprised if plasma life forms have evolved in it.

Perhaps this is where certain UFOs come from, our own Sun...

See for example 2001 Space Odyssey for a similar take.
You expect all people to have morals in the first place. That is an erroneous assumption.
What are live photos?
I don't think aptitude is the reason. A lot of people are physically unfit and have traumatic sports education experiences, probably even more so than math, but athletes remain stars.

The issue is entirely cultural. Entrepreneurs, celebrities, socialites are venerated, scientists aren't. There's no mainstream cultural recognition of scientists and science itself, at best people get attention who monetize research.

Just compare how many people know Musk but don't know who Tom Mueller is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller)
From these set of facts it seems more like the thing lost is curation. People have more freedom and choice now so the top 40 are more representative of what more people want to listen to.

More complex music is still around. We didn't have polyrhythms in the 80s and genres of math rock, prog, and funk are thriving. They're just not top 40.
If I were a chinese hacker trying to do something evil, why on earth would I use a chinese handler/username? Wouldn’t it be better to use an English/European name to gain (even more) trust from open source maintainers?

On the other hand, if I were a non-chinese hacker trying to do evil, then using a chinese handler does make more sense (China is evil, blah blah blah)
Even amortized over a few years, they clearly expect to be able to raise prices soon. If Microsoft stops laundering revenue through OpenAI, and as Stability switches away from free stuff, the best AI tools are about to get a lot more expensive.
They explained pretty clearly why they think that's the case. You're both right though. It's likely not the case that cloud flare is the only company conducting and cooperating with government agencies to do these types of things. In my opinion it would be very silly to assume that.
Who is the employer? I’m all for supporting open source and am a maintainer and contributor myself, but I don’t think blindly stating it should be a job is the solution.
It's not linked to from the page, but here's the GitHub repo for anyone interested:

https://github.com/susam/myrgb
Why is that freelance site representative of jobs in general?

And more importantly: It seems the author did not make any attempt to isolate their variables. i.e. if something happened after ChatGPT was released - it must be the effect of ChatGPT. It's not like there are a zillion other factor affects the availability of different jobs, right?
Homes are hovering about 65% owned by occupiers in the US, chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Home_Ownership_rate.png

So I presume the other 35% is investors? And obviously banks actually own most of your home until you've paid the mortgage in full.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_...
Government organizations have many different teams. One might develop vulnerabilities while another runs operations with oversight for approving use of exploits and picking targets. Think bureaucracy with different project teams and some multi-layered management coordinating strategy at some level.
Wasn't this predictable? I think this is the 3rd or 4th AI bubble bursting in my lifetime.
The problem with using large language models for brainstorming or writing is that the fundamental mechanism by which they work is to choose the most common thing to say at any given point — that is, the most average, middle of the bell curve thing to say. That's how they give the appearance of having any form of coherence, by rarely if ever deviating from the happy path. So any ideas you get from it are going to be pretty unoriginal, and even if you give it original prompts for ideas, it's eventually just going to regress back to the mean again as it traverses the probability space back in the direction of the average at every step. And its writing is always going to be essentially the average human writing style.
It's going to be amazing for hobbyists to get GPUs on the cheap.
It was a lot more fun when vc was buying everyone cheap taxis and movie nights.
100% this. I don’t know why this obvious angle is being ignored. The other puppet accounts had Indian and German names - it’s very clear they were trying to obscure their real origins.
Don’t use the entire thing and you can sleep comfortably.

Also, many rooms let you get the temperature to ~15C.
Problem is that every compiler/compiler version will have different messages for the same error. And xz is the kind of project that gets built on really really random homegrown compilers. Maybe we need an option to make the compilers output a standard JSON or whatever...
A language is something where people understand, they can use it in the real world (but french still can also be hated for example).

But Math beyond the basics is perceived as unnecessary torture, with no practical use, one has to endure to get a diploma.

So yes, my proposal would be to teach it more in a practical, applied way.
Jesus would restore too.
20 on a scale of 10. It's a remote code execution backdoor against the whole world... How bad can it be?
It seems it was discovered in the last minute, close to ending up in ubuntu 24.04 LTS and derivates.

Luckily most users was unaffected unless they used a rolling release distro.

Finally, we still dont have a full analysis so its not known if systemd-enabled sshd is the only attack vector.
I think this take is not really correct, althouth it is the “modern” way RSS is used. You can have the content in the RSS feeds, and some sites do (I am pretty sure axios does this).

I think what really prevents this is the ad-driven web, and a focus on fancy web tech over more-plain text content.
> hardcore protectionism long term only ensure your domestic industry lags behind technologically and falls behind globally.

Is that a real issue though ? Chinese cars don’t seem like they are technically superior to European cars, they are just cheaper for the same prestation (I’m not saying they are worse overall because I know Chinese companies can build great products. But like every other Chinese manufactured product, it’s cheaper because working conditions are worse, social security is worse and the Chinese government is subsidizing the sector heavily.

There is also a huge imbalance between raw materials prices for Chinese companies and the rest of the world, it’s a known fact that china materials are cheaper for local companies than for export.

So their advantage isn’t on the business but rather on the geopolitics side. And that’s not something you can fight with competition, that’s something you must fight with politics, and protectionism seems totally justified in this situation.
The term appears to be "alien" ..

Title 8—Aliens and Nationality CHAPTER I—DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY SUBCHAPTER B—IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS PART 214—NONIMMIGRANT CLASSES

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/214.2

makes NO use of the term "illegal alien"

Searching that Title 8 returns hits on constructs such as "aliens who illegally" but NO hits on "illegal alien".

Undocumented aliens are not always illegally within the USofA, they have alien status and lack documentation. They may or may not have entered illegally, they may have applied for recognition and been passed in.

See, also: https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/legal-documents/FINA...
I think it's beyond us to predict how fast or slow such a transition might be.

I was expecting decent art from a natural language prompt to take much longer than self-driving cars. The cars have remained at "that's interesting but still not enough for public liability requirements" since before any of the current GenAI model architectures were thought up.
...and how many other ones are there?
This is my party trick. Describe a colour and I'll give you the hex code.

As you can imagine I'm really popular at parties...
I'm really excited for it. It's clear to me that the AI proponents are psychopaths trying to do scary and dangerous things to prove their tech is powerful. They should do something useful, like dig dirt.

https://apnews.com/article/openai-voice-engine-aigenerated-c...
This is just a small number of committers and one vuln but by its execution suggests there’s more to be discovered and what’s now on those machines this vuln could execute upon and what’s it done to machines on those networks.
I've read about workplaces that were compromised with multiple people - they would hire a compromised manager, who would then install one or two developers, and shape the environment for them to prevent discovery, which would make these kind of exploits trivial.
I don’t agree with speculating like this, but I also can help wonder how many participants in this thread are the same person.
I enjoyed my game. I had some difficulty playing due to the board not being very wide: many nooks and crannies. In the dictionary, search for « ti » and notice the invalid character in « solfage ». Congrats!
Did the bury the lede? Sure this a blow against "competitors" but that is ultimately a competition for the collection of data, user data. In doing this FB has expanded its ability to hoover up more data at the individual user level, correct?

Yeah, crap move but my concern isn't those other scoundrels, it's me / us.
“Whole world” don’t you think that’s a bit overly dramatic?
If that were true, maybe. Since the Soviet Union was far more than that it doesn't quite match.
Yes, the only mitigating factor here is that it was discovered before reaching any major distributions
Wouldn’t Meta simply hire unlicensed “engineers”?
> You really do not need anything google, except of course AOSP

I'm using a GNU/Linux phone just fine. No Android is needed.
There has been a larger increase in computing power in the last 5 years than there was in the entire history of computers beforehand.
And what us regular folks who run Ubuntu LTS on VMs need to do, if anything.
I too have been trying to find out about the hack.

There has been a lot of interesting analysis of the code, which has a feeling of the awe and sophistication of stuxnet yet on the scale of “this could be the work of a single motivated coder … like one of us”.

But what I haven’t found yet, and would like leads on, is what ther thinking is about the attack in a wider context…

What is the current thinking on:

1. Was the malicious code inserted by the new contributor, or was this likely a compromised account?

2. If the new contributor did it, did they become an xz maintainer with the aim of acting maliciously?

3. If the new contributor was malicious, why take so long to attack and why do it in xz? Or are they also attacking lots of other systems, perhaps under other names?

4. And what can we do about these attacks? How can we build a system that isn’t ultimately brought crashing down by one or two bad actors?

5. Small technical detail I haven’t spotted in writeups: was the attack commands signed in some way so only the attacker can use it and the world can go hunting for a smoking gun cert that matches the attacker?
> I don't know if you are aware, but you've almost directly stated the core thesis of Mein Kampf.

I had no idea, but I doubt that it is written from the perspective of looking at this as an "unpleasant fact".
Are these paid posts?
And don't forget that GPL is bad, only BSD and MIT are the real free licenses because they let us take the code and sell it on without forcing us to contribute back.
The actual compiler output from the autoconf feature test is one of the things I'd probably look at fairly early on if some feature is disabled when it shouldn't be, but I maybe have a bit more experience running into problems with this than younger folks.
I'm familiar with this term for over a decade and also experienced it during the 90's and I just had the realization that Canada is experiencing something similar right now with influx of immigrants, asylum seekers and temporary foreign workers. I'm pessimistic about the future and sad about the loss of the culture. I still use Usenet but it's not the same, Canada will continue to exist but it will be very different country .
"A lot of people are physically unfit and have traumatic sports education experiences"

Good point, but I would argue more people are unfit for math, than unfit for sports education. (At least in europe)

"There's no mainstream cultural recognition of scientists and science itself"

With the exception of Einstein yes. And maybe Stephen Hawking.

"The issue is entirely cultural."

And yes it is, but I believe this can be changed by making math, the language of science, more approachable.
48GB VRAM gaming let's GOOOOOO.

But seriously, most of that stuff is completely useless for anything but machine learning tasks, which you'll find some hobbyists for, but for all that stuff that is floating around right now? As a hobbyist you need one GPU.
Arch was doing the same..
I like this process much better than using pre-compiled virtual machine images that let's just say certain State controlled businesses are offering up as an easier way to install dependencies and or tool – chains needed for their "Open source" hardware.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-share

Seems like a useful tool also!
I feel total sympathy for the maintainer if they 100% didn’t know what was going on.

It’s also unfortunate that the maintainer will be associated with the lack of judgement. But they will get through it. Probably time to pass the torch fully now though.
Are you suggesting to ask a state actor to demonstrate commitment before participating in the discussion? :)

I mean, the idea of commitment -> privilege isn’t bad. But it’s got nothing to offer in the story of xz.
The most popular distributions are rolling-release ones, so not sure about that.
Quelle surprise! Technerds doing what they are good at: spending other people's money.
Because it needs to be able to spawn processes as any user.
Shutting down the letsblock.it project and its official instance
How will personalized AI be possible in the current system?
Hi, how do you guys think personalized AI will be made possible, given that companies are currently independently collecting user data without a central point for it? A good personalized AI would know a lot about the user's interests, preferences, etc. For example, if someone engages with Star Wars-content on Reddit and they like to use Midjourney on Discord, then a personalized AI might suggest the user to create Star Wars style images.

What do you guys think? Any articles, podcasts, etc. on this?
I think the really scary part is the particular modus operandi that this demonstrates, that is easily repeatable. A malicious actor builds up a reputation in the open source space and eventually takes ownership of the release process at which point a backdoor is inserted.

There is absolutely nothing that would suggest this hasn't happened before or will not happen again.
Many people seem to get hung up on questions related to the specifics about the implementation of computational models, but mathematicians don’t, because the fundamental aspects of the theory don’t change much when you swap out one particular model of universal computation for another.

As noted, Kolomogorov complexity depends on the specific UTM only up to a constant factor (this is known as the invariance theorem). But even the change in runtime, memory usage, and essentially anything else you might think are important are bounded by a factor that is either a constant or a “slow-growth” function (e.g. a polynomial) when you swap out one computational model for another. These small terms are generally dwarfed by the size of the data itself (even for small datasets) and the complexity of the algorithms used.

That said, I also share some of your confusion on the “specifics” when it comes to Solomonoff induction. I have yet to understand why the universal distribution uses negative exponentiated program size to weight the universal a priori probability of a particular string as opposed to some measure that involves program runtime or frequency over an equivalence class of programs that implement the same algorithm.

Solomonoff was careful to point out that his universal distribution is more of a class of distributions that have certain “universally optimal” convergence properties given a reasonable assumption on the underlying model of data generation: a deterministic algorithm with a short description that has access to a source of randomness. But I think many people since then have made the unwarranted leap that Solomonoff induction is the best induction scheme for all models of data generation, including data obtained via observation within our universe. I’m not sure that has been proven true. And if it has, I certainly haven’t come across the paper showing it.
Uh, another noob one discovering an age-old, well known tool. Now post the link to its Wikipedia article!
Being the largest shovel maker and the only one with a solid software ecosystem for those shovels(?) during a gold rush will do that, huh?
In practice, it's a non-issue for anyone using a stable version of a major Linux distro, such as Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or RHEL/Alma/Rocky 9. The liblzma in those distros were cut and frozen long before our suspect began to have serious involvement in its development. (Not sure about Amazon Linux. Arch doesn't seem to be affected.)

The more worrying question is, what else was compromised by these kinds of people, and for how long?
A Close-Up View of the Baltimore Bridge Collapse
https://archive.ph/Wexf9
It isn’t really my kinda game but it looks like it could be really good
One can make larger fission bombs, but they end up being very unsafe, since they contain several critical masses of material. I believe the UK made a 500 kT fission bomb.

Fusion devices are smaller and safer to handle and, most importantly, are considerably cheaper per yield.
Nah it’s the opposite. At the moment there’s a lot of low hanging fruit, AI companies can make money from the difference between GPT4 and free models.

Once we get free models that are as good as GPT4, while there will still be a market for a “GPT5”, the current applications will experience serious price competition.
tangent, one of the funnier stats I've heard recently: the price/revenue ratio for Nvidia stock is about 37. the price/revenue ratio for truth social is over 1000.
If inference costs 17x revenue you'd better raise prices because bringing in customers is just going to increase costs. If training costs 17x revenue you'd better bring in some customers, but you might be alright in the long term if you've trained something useful.
The software dev world also had its eternal september about 15 years ago I'd say. Since then we're even more being flooded with bullshit hypetrains and all.
Hopefully until then we will have stuff that, without requiring specific hardware or hardware from specific vendors, easily runs on home computers. Best with the ability to let the models relearn from chosen sources of knowledge.
Something I've observed as an English speaking immigrant is that in general, the US/UK is very forgiving when it comes to foreigners trying to speak English. Where certain types of phrasing and harsh words would not be tolerated with first language English speakers, the benefit of the doubt is given to 2nd/3rd language speakers because they

1. Might not have the vocabulary to express themselves correctly

2. Not understand the nuance and connotations that their word choices imply

I've seen my colleagues get frustrated in meetings while simulatenously having to assume good intent.

Choosing names like the bad actor(s) did gives them an advantage in this scenario.
I could have been much worse, but was identified last minute. Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora had the code only in their testing channels, and overall only .deb or .rpm based distros with systemd have been affected (see https://gist.github.com/thesamesam/223949d5a074ebc3dce9ee78b... ). We have to make sure open source maintainers are not underpaid, and stop the madness of global commons exploitation.
Really so much fun!

This guy produces great things. He did that micro drawing language a while back, right?

Would also be cool to have a camera link where you can select the color to guess by pointing the camera at something.

I find this guy so inspiring. He codes and creates tools like I aspire to. Just beautiful stuff!
You can’t think of anybody else in the CDN or DoS mitigation business other than cloudflare?
And then you have to go through the sysadmin team to temporarily enable push --force on your branch
Boris Yeltsin's 1989 Visit to a Houston Grocery Store Is Now an Opera
WPENGINE.COM
I would add a couple of important things:

- mention of the 3-2-1 backup rule

- include emails and other social accounts into the backup strategy

- validating and restoring backups is as important as creating them
>it’s cheaper because working conditions are worse, social security is worse and the Chinese government is subsidizing the sector heavily.

Isn't this the same for every product made in China vs made in the West?

Your smartphone, your laptop, your sneakers, etc they're all made by Chinese workers with much less wages and social benefits/protections than workers who would be making them in the west.

Why no big tariffs on those to protect our local electronics/clothing manufacturing industries?
It's funny that this is probably applauded as a win, even at the highest levels of corporate leadership. If a human had done it, there would be less patience for how generosity like this impacts the budget. That seems silly, and is, but why do you think front line agents so often need to escalate to supervisors? It's only a matter of time until people decide they want the AI to run the chat, but also to get more stingy.
The actual colour may have been #950 or #951 which looks very similar to #951.

Pulling the blue slider down by a notch or two could have got you a perfect match.

Here is a demo of these colours if you want to see for yourself how similar they look:

https://susam.net/code/bin/2024-03-31-rgb-952.html
OK let's go!

A muddy yellow reminiscent of the sweet and sour fruit found across Central America and the Southern States.

(Taken from a paint description)
Yawn. Nothing interesting happening in the world right now, innit? Submitter must be 20 or something.
Wiretapping: In re Google RTB Consumer Privacy Litigation [pdf]
Reminds me of this: http://yizzle.com/whatthehex/
This is a lot of fun :)
Cults gonna cult

Looked this up and yeah, that’s insane. Their share price per user is above $1,000 while Reddit is $150, X is $80. Crazy stuff!