skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think one reason for a change in music could be the "downfall" of record labels as a big driver in the music industry. You can blame them for taking a big cut away from the artists, but the whole industry did a lot for developing the music. I had thought about this more from a perspecitve of the use of very talented studio musicions to help bands, but it may have impact on writing too. Of course, even if that was an effect on quality of music in any way, I think people have much bette access to music now than ever before. I couldn't afford to buy records or cds back when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.
Yes this is Linux.

At this time we don't know exactly how much is affected and what originally drew the attention of the attacker(s).
The later submission got the discussion: [0] (73 points, 3 days ago, 77 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39839871
Also my daily driver for any bitmap-related operations.
One little thing that became my muscle memory over the years is using it to view/edit/crop latest clipboard entry, most often screenshots, through simple hotkey (olden AutoHotkey) launcher with `/clippaste` command line parameter.

; open / view current clipboard in irfanView
; win alt i
#!i::run,path\to\IrfanView\i_view32.exe /clippaste

(Funny, totally forgot I still use 32 bit version.) There are lots of command line options available i_view32 provides.
You just have to be a bit more specific. I have had success with AI writing code but I have to drive it. It’s a massive time saver though.

I have also had success with classification tasks, like look at this email and then look at this list of topics, and pick which topic this email relates to, or “other” if you can’t see an obvious choice.

But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”.
I admit to being flummoxed by this line of argumentation, since Hamas is famous for throwing supporters of the PA off rooftops during the 2006 elections --- the fact that only a small minority of Gazans are old enough ever to have voted in an election in Gaza is part of why collectively punishing them for Hamas' actions is so atrocious. Amnesty has been running campaigns about Hamas suppression of the press for almost a decade now.

You're making, as well, the argument that Gazans have access to real journalism (and may themselves practice real journalism) in spite of Hamas. I agree completely. I made a very narrow point about a comparison drawn between Hamas and Israel, that's all.
Opportunity to write a paper
*shared* objects with dynamic lifetimes.

With properly architected code, the times you need to use rc are extremely small.
Including those events would certainly change the picture. I don't like how the article implies that all this was a result of GitHub founders being smart rather than SourceForge misplaying their hand. The article smacks of the irrational worship of successful founders that's so common.

In reality, I think there was (and still is, albeit small) market for alternative hosting, and there definitely were niches where SourceForge was better at (downloading binaries, for example). If SourceForge didn't misplay their hand, it's entirely possible Github won't have the near monopoly on open source hosting they have now.
Sounds like IrfanView just needs more PM's and VC's
Summary: Writing, down a lot. Translation and customer service down a little.

If it's on a freelancing site, it's very low end customer service.

LLMs for customer service still appear to suck.[1]

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/businesses-discovering-ai-suck...
So the headline is pretty clearly right, we were coming out of the circa 2016 deep learning bubble and expectations were being adjusted, gen AI came in and the hype roared back up, now we're peaking, the same problems from before are still there even if the demos are cooler, and expectations need to be tempered again.

But instead of that, the article starts with

The tech's drawbacks are hard to overlook. Large language models like ChatGPT are prone to hallucinating and spreading misinformation. Both chatbots and AI image makers have been accused of plagiarizing writers and artists. And overall, the hardware that generative AI uses needs enormous amounts of energy, gutting the environment.

None of those (hallucination maybe) are relevant, if it's good at automating misinformation, surely it can do useful work as well. This is more just a list of random criticisms.

Then

Perhaps most of all, according to Gary Marcus...

No point in continuing to read.
Software engineers make significantly above the median salary in most US markets. So it stands to reason that they are more likely to own a home.
Wow. I would run, not walk, away from any tech company that had this role.

Since you asked: I'm one of the principals at Fly.io. Before that, I was one of the founders of Latacora, which embeds directly inside of startups for years at a time running their security teams full time. Before that, I founded Matasano Security. Before that, I was a Product Manager at Arbor Networks, after being the lead developer on their DOS product for a couple years. I'll stop there (I'm older than the median HN commenter).

Later

For what it's worth, for companies literally chartered to do scientific exploration --- drug discovery chemistry, for example --- I completely buy that there is a real "Chief Scientist" role, though I can't claim to understand that role well enough to defend it. But that doesn't describe any software company anywhere. Regardless, "CTO" is something different.
We might be thinking of different zippers.
Wow this is really great.
“Planting trees” is one of those things that sound great on paper, or in a sound-bite, but the reality is problematic.

1. “Planting trees” actually means “planting seedlings”. There is no guarantee that the majority of seedlings will grow to be full sized trees. Once a “tree is planted” then the box is ticked.

On our farm we've planted a variety of about 500 native seedlings this year, and let me tell you, it takes hard work to keep them alive through the first Summer, even when mulched and given protectors.

A planted seedling is not a tree.

2. People tend to plant monocultures I can't count the number of times someone has pointed to neat, ordered ranks of nothing but pine-trees or blue-gums and labelled it a “forest”. Nope. A forest is an ecosystem, a great variety of plants — trees, shrubs, bushes, mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens — and animals. A monoculture is not “habitat” to anything much.

City people especially see these things and feel good that they're there, but it's like comparing a properly cooked and seasoned steak with the cheapest cheeseburger you can find.

Sorry, not a forest.

3. These monocultures, pines and bluegums and what have you, are not designed to be there forever (unlike a real forest). They're a crop. They're designed to be harvested. Bluegums for paper pulp; pine for furniture and framing timber. They're a product. They're planted, harvested and processed with more fossil-fuel inputs than they “save” by “carbon sequestration”.

Planting trees is good, but it's very much about appeasing someone's conscience, or looking “green”. The most important thing is not to cut them down in the first place. But growth economics demand that we do exactly that: clear land, cut down trees.
Do you see the dot? XZ backdoor
C is not stable, CPU microarchitecture versions are coming from time to time. LZMA compression is not far from trivial. the trade-offs made back then might not be the most useful ones now, hence there are usually things that make sense to change even if the background math will be the same forever.

sure, churn and make believe maintenance for the sake of feeling good is harmful. (and that's where the larger community comes in, distributions, power users, etc. we need to help good maintainers, and push back against bad ones. and yes this is - of course - easier said than done.)
> So unless that key is leaked

But, just for replayability, we could "patch" the exploit with a known key and see what it does, don't we?
There is in fact an excellent excuse (reason) today: it is still not practical to DIY a current generation cell phone, and certainly not the cutting edge stuff like a foldable.
The Boss Is Calling Late. Should the Law Let You Ignore It?
There's a reasonably high chance this was to target a specific machine, or perhaps a specific organization's set of machines. After that it could probably be sold off once whatever they were using it for was finished.

I doubt we'll ever know the intention unless the ABC's throw us a bone and tell us the results of their investigation (assuming they're not the ones behind it).
I’ve been through this 3 times on my recovery journey. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. The first time resulted in two seizures because I was just trying to get over it at home. Resulted in getting 7 staples in the back of my head. It is ALWAYS worth going to a medically assisted detox facility, personal pride or potential costs be damned.
sounds great,, can you give a website for your project ?
I bought a house after about 4 years in the industry. It's going to be less likely to happen in certain markets, especially if you live in high tax states like CA.
Performant code does not need to be unclean, exactly! My original point was just to not put performance on a pedestal. Sure, prioritize it, but correct and clean should come first - at least for foundational libraries that others are supposed to build upon.

I maintain ML libraries that run on microcontrollers with kilobytes of memory, performance is a friend of mine ;)
Agreed! My hot take among my millennial friends is that popular music today is way more varied and interesting than what we grew up with. Sorry 50 cent. And it’s not like that music disappeared. We get both!

My only complaint is how short songs are now. Everything is tiktok optimized.
AI giving wildly incorrect answers is incredibly relevant.

And if it can "surely" do useful work... why isn't it? That's like saying, "Sure, this car burns oil, but if it can do that, it can surely do more than that and be my daily driver."
The difference, IMHO, is that it's easier to pick an easy guessable password than it is to create an insecure RSA key (on purpose).
>Mr. Haney, a Democrat, got the idea from Australia’s new “right to disconnect” law, to be implemented later this year. It will allow workers to reject “unreasonable” professional communication outside of their regular workday. The idea originated in France and has spread in various forms to countries including Canada, Italy, Belgium and the Philippines. New York City debated a similar proposal in 2018, but didn’t adopt it.
Sounds great! thank you, you seem to be good at this
I wonder if this was him being clever, or him getting carbon monoxide poisoning.
I recently found out, that songwriting and writing the lyrics can be very much separate. I was reading an interview of the metal band Sulphur Aeon, and apparently the songwriter writes the music, and then hands it over to the vocalist, who writes the lyrics for them.

As a very vocal oriented person (though as I like extreme metal, I often can't understand them), that was fascinating to me, as music and vocals are so very connected to me.
Skimming [1], Virgil Layouts resemble ArrayBuffers in JavaScript -- a boxed view of some native span of memory. If I'm reading that right, it's basically an escape-hatch from the GC for "mixed" environments -- the buffer itself is owned by a GC'd proxy, but it doesn't doesn't e.g. contain GC references internally.

That's useful for lots of low-level interfaceing (e.g. communicating with serial interfaces or device drivers), but one couldn't, however, build an "allocator" in a Layout for GC'd objects the way, e.g., in native code you can make a "bump allocator" for arbitrary structs which are "free"ed with just a pointer-reset (pretty important, e.g., in game engines, which is my field).
Dude, a toasty hot duvet in a freezing cold bedroom far in the northern hemisphere is something you're missing out on.
The down payment is actually a big issue for many. You can be making enough that you could afford the higher payment, but waiting 5 years to build a down payment could see huge price surges, thus extending how long you need to save.
One of the biggest differences is that if you're using password auth, and you are tricked into connecting to a malicious server, that server now has your plaintext password and can impersonate you to other servers.

If you use a different strong random password for every single server, this attack isn't a problem, but that adds a lot of management hassle compared to using a single private key. (It's also made more difficult by host key checking, but let's be honest, most of us don't diligently check the fingerprints every single time we get a mismatch warning.)

In contrast, if you use an SSH key, then a compromised server never actually gets a copy of your private key unless you explicitly copy it over. (If you're have SSH agent forwarding turned on, then during the compromised connection, the server can run a "confused deputy" attack to authenticate other connections using your agent's identity. But it loses that ability when you disconnect.)
And in China:
https://www.wordforest.org/2024/03/08/chinas-reforestation-j...
>But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what businesses want to accomplish.
They don’t get enough hours because the employers don’t want to be responsible for their healthcare. It’s cheaper to keep someone below 30/hr week than it is to let them go above that and quality for full-time benefits.
Because it beats watching the world burn sober.
ChatGPT with GPT-4 and Claude Opus. Probably a bit unnecessary to pay for both but I still haven't picked a favorite between the two.
Yes, your argument corresponds to the Western understanding of a market economy.

But the world has been flooded with incredibly cheap electronics for years - some of them highly subsidized. It is apparently still profitable for this market to solder out components from used devices and reuse them in new devices.

And not just for toys or everyday appliances such as flashlights, but also for medical devices or devices with precision mechanics. I'm just surprised that inkjet printers are the exception here.
AT&T Says Data from 73M Accounts Were Leaked to Dark Web
"Quebec maple syrup strategic reserve"

I had no idea.
Yeah, the expense of doing it “right” is really high and much of it’s an ongoing cost, while the cases in which it’s better than cheaper options like hiring a few more lowish-wage workers or doing a little training or just… using some normal-ass program that does the same thing but a bit less “smart”, aren’t as common as businesses seem to wish they were.
Step 1: buy some land with some native vegetation on it.

Step 2: Don't clear it.

Step 3: Look after it. Counter intuitivively, this step might involve setting fire to bits of it, depending on where you live.

There is no monetary “profit” step. Given our current trajectory and terminal velocity with regards to climate change and biodiversity loss, it probably will make no difference in the broader scheme of things, but the local animals will be happy to have their homes and food supply while it lasts.

There are possibly some conservation organisations that will enable you to put the land under some kind of lasting “covenant” to protect it.
Someone I know died a year ago from trying to quit cold turkey.
https://archive.ph/wrBb8
With LLMs at least, it feels like it's best to just treat "AI" as another type of user interface. If your business/idea can use an interface like this, cool, it might be a nicer way to interact. But it's not there yet for replacing most employees, and honestly feels like it's being used as a scape goat for a crappy economy or monetary policy driven layoffs.
U.S. Should Stand Up a 10k-Man Cyber Force
It is closer to a shovel vs hands rather than an automated excavator.
We can’t let those syrup producers get richer! No no we need everyone to only consume Uber pure syrup that has a 10x foot print and cost.
don't most people who use that just use it for scanning incoming email attachments usually?
My manual encounter was with the door of a VW Beetle, not a zipper.
You may also be interested to know it was robbed about 10 years ago:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_H...
> Different human languages don't figure into this at all and are completely irrelevant.

Back to basics: A Turing machine is specified by a set of symbols it can read/write to a tape, and a state machine matching current state and read symbol to next state and actions.

If that set of symbols is just {1,0}, then it absolutely, positively, cannot print out the string "ABC".

> the best compression methods out all have a variable length (measured in bits) alphabet.

This is a category error....if the compression algorithm reads and writes binary data, its alphabet is "zero" and "one." The symbols read and written by a Turing machine are atomic--they are not composed of any simpler parts.

Sure, external to the turning machine, you can adopt some conventions which map bit patterns to letters in a different alphabet. But a binary Turing machine cannot print out those letters--it can only print out a string of 1's and 0's.

The mapping from strings in the binary language to letters in the target language cannot participate in the calculations for the complexity of a string in another language. Because if it did, again, you could make the Kolmogorov complexity of any arbitrary string S you choose to be 0, because you could just say the null output maps to S.

This is a subtle problem, often glossed over or just missed entirely. We are so used to encoding things in binary that it might not occur to us unless we think about it deeply.

Nevertheless, it is a real, genuine problem.
I recently started having trouble with 7zip at work due to shared sharepoint folders and the like. I wound up finding ZanaZip which was forked from 7zip but keeps up with modern OS changes.
Actual article: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/ai-chatbot-letdown-hype-rea...
Not to discourage you, but mature forest is generally close to carbon neutral. It stores a reasonable amount of carbon, but usually isn't sequestering much more. For actually offsetting carbon, what you want is new growth. Typically, this is done by cutting the trees to make room for new ones while preventing the wood you cut from decomposing back into CO2.

So if your goal is direct carbon offset, your best bet might cut a clearing and use it to build your house --- possibly even intentionally cutting a larger clearing than you otherwise would. Unless your land was cut recently, in which case letting it grow the way you plan might be just fine.

If your new land is in the Northeastern US, you might enjoy reading the reports from this group: https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/
How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope
> 2. People tend to plant monocultures I can't count the number of times someone has pointed to neat, ordered ranks of nothing but pine-trees or blue-gums and labelled it a “forest”. Nope. A forest is an ecosystem, a great variety of plants — trees, shrubs, bushes, mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens — and animals. A monoculture is not “habitat” to anything much.

I'm not disagreeing with you on the bigger picture (at all) but I'm interested:

1. If a monoculture not-quite-a-forest is planted and not harvested, won't it gradually become a more varied ecosystem over time? As in, won't shrubs, bushes, mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens, and animals (not to mention other varieties of trees) gradually 'move in'?

2. Are we in danger of letting perfect be the enemy of good here? Would we rather have no new trees at all in a space, or a monoculture not-quite-a-forest (assuming it's not for harvest)?
I think that’s really it. Pop used to be much better because pop was a serious thing that attracted the best musicians and discerning listeners. Now the best musicians and listeners are all in niche musical communities. Pop is dead.

This mirrors a broader trend. There really isn’t a majority anymore or a popular culture. There are only a million fluid ever changing niches and subcultures, seemingly so rapidly changing and evolving that they can’t even be named.
They're also great for running tolls.

I don't feel great about toll roads, personally, but I do feel that if you're using a license plate contraption to dodge tolls, your car should be crushed into a cube while you watch.
More than TikTok optimized, stream optimized. Artists get paid by individual stream, so they make their songs shorter in hopes of getting more streams per album.
> But you can’t say “hey AI do this person’s job for me”.

If AI needs to steered around by an expert to be effective that's going to limit its appeal.
The role of legislature is to create the law. The role of the courts is to interpret the law.

If an agency wants to expand it's purview, it is the job of the legislative branch to change the law.
Pick one: xzdoor, backdoorssh
HG TTS arena is asking if the text-to-speech sounds human like. That's somewhat different from voice cloning. A model might produce audio which is less human like, but still sound closer to the target voice.
No - these are exactly the issues being brought up where I work.

They make mistakes, carry potential legal liabilities and cost a fortune ( dollars or carbon ) to run. The only difference with before is that they now look a lot closer to being able to replace people for real, and that’s a significant difference.

Now, replace ‘ai’ with ‘employee’ and the profits must be very clear to hire such an unreliable person. Some companies worry about these things.

In my view if the amount of mistakes could be acceptably low, this would change the game ( both ‘ acceptably’ and ‘low’ are valid directions).
Buttons? A zip? I've never seen a cover that doesn't have a way of keeping it closed.
> Preferring political/economic norms in the face of evidence it’s actively harmful

What a laughable statement. The default state of humanity is scrounging around in the forest for scraps. All the prosperity around you is the result of a particular set of “political/economic norms” and once you’ve found a magic combination that results in the US rather than Afghanistan you should be extremely afraid to change anything. You’re standing high on a mountain your ancestors climbed up and there’s very little keeping you from falling back down it.

You should be particularly skeptical of new ideas, because according to Sturgeon’s law there’s a 90% chance it’s crap.
If you think about it this is a data-providence problem though. The exploit was hidden in "test" code which gets included in release code by compiler flags.

Now, if there was a proper chain of accountability for data, then this wouldn't have been possible to hide the way it is - any amount of pre-processing resulting in the release tarball including derived products of "test" files would be suspicious.

The problem is we don't actually track data providence like this - no build system does. The most we do is <git hash in> -> <some deterministic bits out>. But we don't include the human readable data which explains how that transform happens at enough levels.
I would have thought NSA would have hardware/firmware backdoor everywhere and wouldn't need this.
A friend of mine’s mother came down with a rare form of dementia at a sadly young age for that to happen. It was a strange experience talking with her because in most ways she was very lucid, but sometimes she would just veer off into stories that were obviously delusional. Conversing with the LLMs rather reminds me of that sometimes. But she was not able to work because of this disability.
Something similar happens in Larry Niven's "Footfall", though I won't say what to avoid spoilers.