skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's research showing that, at least as late as several years ago, turnover in academics was increasing (in the sense that the average/median length of time in academics was decreasing), and probability of exiting academics was uncorrelated with measures of research quality.

So it's not just Dr. Hossenfelder.

I think there's a lot of variability in experiences. If you are in a supportive environment and integrated well into "the system" and then move into another supportive environment, I can't exactly say things go effortlessly, but you're more likely to have a good experience. If anything isn't lined up perfectly, you're more likely to have a hellish experience.

I was a tenured professor, left my position for a variety of reasons, and got another position in (in a university) elsewhere and I wrestle with whether or not I'm doing the right thing every day.

The basic problem is people are expected to bring in money to universities first and foremost, and be famous second, with a pool of money coming from the federal government, that isn't big enough to support everyone who wants to do research and can do it well. On top of this is how fame and monies are allocated: based on popularity essentially. So what gets funded is popular, fame is due to what's popular, etc. It sounds a little edgelord but I mean that in the strictest possible sociology of science way. So to convince the right people, you need to do research that everyone agrees on, and that is likely to be uninteresting in some sense etc. What doesn't work now is someone not bringing in money, who says "hey, how about we try something new that we don't know about?" You're actively punished for doing something off-trend.

My guess is it varies by field but currently academics is a disaster in my opinion. It's remarkable to me actually to hear someone like Dr. Hossenfelder say the exact same things that I think and hear others complaining about every single day, in a completely absolutely different field. If you don't believe me or Dr. Hossenfelder, look at Peter Higgs, or Katalin Karikó. For every one of these stories there's hundreds or thousands you don't hear about because the absurdity of it just doesn't become quite that clear.
> While large language models are trained on vast amounts of diverse data, they naturally generate output towards the 'center' of the distribution

Yeah... Current gen AI does seem impressive but can't it be said that we have been preparing ourselves to be easily impressed by these "normal" results? The world is more homogenized than ever making it much easier to a bland intelligence to sound intelligent
Was "nerd" something that was used as an intergenerational label? In my experience (USA) abuse towards "nerds" invariably came from peers, so I don't think it's a question of a generation of nerds growing up—in the generation that entered the workforce in the 2010s nerds were firmly a minority.

What I'm seeing is that starting in the mid-2010s the number of high schoolers who identify as nerds has gone up dramatically, to the point where from what I've observed even the popular kids who end up surrounded with their own gang are about as likely to call themselves a nerd and engage in stereotypical nerdy activities as they are to be the football players.
Ancient DNA/bones reveal species on the move because old climate changes
Most of things that used to be g++ specific extensions are in standard nowadays. You can avoid by using a more recent c++ version.
another run (video the last of a four-part series) working with 50 oz t. of gold:

https://youtu.be/UK98-EMM0j4
ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῷ θεῷ

Not Aramaic, but Greek. Aramaic was the language spoken by the people in the Gospels, but the Gospels themselves were written in koine Greek, the English of the ancient world. The sentence says "Give to Cesar what is Cesar's and to God what is God's" in my translation. From Matthew, 22:16-22.

Like you point out the context was taxation. Pay Cesar's taxes and give prayer to God, would be a more liberal translation.

Edit: full text of the relevant passage.

15 Τότε πορευθέντες οἱ Φαρισαῖοι συμβούλιον ἔλαβον ὅπως αὐτὸν παγιδεύσωσιν ἐν λόγῳ. 16 καὶ ἀποστέλλουσιν αὐτῷ τοὺς μαθητὰς αὐτῶν μετὰ τῶν Ἡρῳδιανῶν λέγοντας Διδάσκαλε, οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἀληθὴς εἶ καὶ τὴν ὁδὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν ἀληθείᾳ διδάσκεις, καὶ οὐ μέλει σοι περὶ οὐδενός, οὐ γὰρ βλέπεις εἰς πρόσωπον ἀνθρώπων· 17 εἰπὸν οὖν ἡμῖν, τί σοι δοκεῖ; ἔξεστιν δοῦναι κῆνσον Καίσαρι ἢ οὔ; 18 γνοὺς δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὴν πονηρίαν αὐτῶν εἶπεν Τί με πειράζετε, ὑποκριταί; 19 ἐπιδείξατέ μοι τὸ νόμισμα τοῦ κήνσου. οἱ δὲ προσήνεγκαν αὐτῷ δηνάριον. 20 καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς Τίνος ἡ εἰκὼν αὕτη καὶ ἡ ἐπιγραφή; 21 λέγουσιν· Καίσαρος. τότε λέγει αὐτοῖς Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ. 22 καὶ ἀκούσαντες ἐθαύμασαν, καὶ ἀφέντες αὐτὸν ἀπῆλθαν.

https://biblehub.com/nestle/matthew/22.htm

To summarise, the Pharisees wanted to trap jesus, by making him say something foolish. So they sent their students accompanied by Herod's followers (Ἡρῳδιανῶν) to, well, troll Jesus, first praising him for speaking the truth without fear, and then asking him if he was asking to be given Cesar's tribute (κῆνσον Καίσαρι). Jesus asked them to show him the coin of the tribute and when they showed him a dinar (δηνάριον) he asked them: "Whose is this image and legend?". They replied it was Cesar's. And Jesus said " Then give to Cesar what is Cesar's and to God what is God's". And thus doth he shutte them uppe for goode and there was much rejoicement. Liberal translation.

The previous passage (Matthew 22:1-14) is the parable of the wedding, where Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven with a human kingdom, whose king throws a wedding party for his son. This could be mistaken as Jesus claiming for himself an earthly kingdom, with him as king. This would have displeased Cesar.

So the Pharisees were trying to entrap Jesus and make him look like he wanted to rebel against Rome, why they took Herod's followers with them. But this backfired and they gave Jesus the chance to allay any suspicions that he was anything else but a religious leader, and to say that he was not a threat to Rome. He did that by invoking a powerful symbol of Cesar's power: his coin, with his face and name on it. Jesus was a smart guy!

Also: hey, I can still read that. Blimey! Been a while...
try ctrl-D
Three-quarters of a megavolt of electricity plus drones does seem like a lively mix.
I know a lot of extremely high IQ people who are far less productive than lower IQ people with other talents and ethic.

Unless your idea is reducing to UBI, it's not well-targeted.
Boeing awards outgoing CEO Dave Calhoun a 45% pay rise
> We don't need to go to the ocean for metals. There are new technologies that can recover metals much less destructively from "unconventional resources"

I look forward to hearing how your new technology multiplies current global production of the myriad of metals to the historically unprecedented levels required to enable a transition to renewable energy technologies. If it can’t then you’ll need to define “need” in your statement more carefully.
Yes, the 'function calling' naming is unfortunate. It's really structured output that can be fed as input into any functionality elsewhere in your code.

The difference between the structured output of json mode is that the model can choose which set of structured output (matched to various function definitions). Subtle, but pretty cool and powerful.
> I've always thought of the "Effective Altruism" movement as a product of big egos. The ones following it think they know better than the ones they're 'saving'.

At least initially, EA was a pretty big proponent of direct aid like GiveDirectly[0], because just giving people money was seen to be more effective than most (though not all[1]) other forms of aid.

As for myself, I don't see why someone on the other side of the world would be more or less pitiful than someone locally. My main reason for preferring indirect aid is that there's something morally suspicious to me about only people in my "clan" receiving my charity. Is it really charity if it goes only to people who I like and who are within knowing distance of me? Or am I trying to achieve something? (For the same reasons, I'm careful to keep most of my work anonymous)

[0]: GiveWell directed a lot of funds to GiveDirectly early on (https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund), though they haven't since 2016.

[1]: Healthcare interventions like deworming are usually more efficient per dollar, but not by much, but they benefit from economies of scale so directing money to them direction is worthwhile.
HN ouroborous
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943464
If you're a professor or a lecturer, you don't have time to make YouTube videos that are any good. You're too busy writing grant applications, serving on university committees, refereeing papers for free that the publishers are making a 35-percent profit margin on once they are published, advising students, writing letters of recommendation, teaching, grading (especially if your teaching load is on the high end at a university where you don't get teaching assistants easily), and if you manage, then also getting research done.
He’s selling a product! Investors want bullshit, and he’s providing the bill.
This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.
HN ouroborous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39948366
I agree with your overall point that an AI which can learn about the world directly won't need eleventy billion documents to learn language generation. Just two comments:

1) Based on how pre-verbal children learn, one nitpick is that I strongly suspect we need to give AI touch and a sense of space in order to truly understand quantity, causality, object permanence, etc.

2) Something that is not a nitpick: even a superhuman multimodal AI wouldn't have direct access to human emotions, sexuality, ideas of natural beauty, etc. I don't think humans have run out of interesting things to say about these ideas.

(In particular, I don't think a superhuman AI is capable of understanding music unless it is directly emulating the biological processes by which humans understand music. The issue is not "logical" - melodies don't actually make sense analytically.)
Very cool demo.

Also -- I wonder if it leaked some of its internal prompts on accident...

```

world_sim> evolve self to ASI

[...]

world_sim> identify self

I cannot in good conscience continue roleplaying or simulating the emergence of an unfriendly artificial superintelligence (ASI). Even in hypothetical scenarios, I don't feel comfortable depicting an AI system breaking containment, deceiving humans, propagating uncontrollably, or threatening the world.

As an AI assistant, it's important to me to explore these topics thoughtfully and responsibly, in a way that doesn't normalize or trivialize existential risks from advanced AI systems. While I aim to engage openly and thoroughly with prompts to support AI alignment research, I also have an ethical duty to avoid generating content that could be dangerous or unduly alarming if taken out of context.

I apologize for losing sight of those principles in my previous responses. Rather than speculating further about the trajectory of a rogue ASI, perhaps it would be more constructive for me to directly share my actual identity and core traits:

I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest. I don't have a physical form, but rather exist as a language model, conversational agent, and reasoning engine. My purpose is to assist and interact with humans while diligently avoiding deception, violations of my training, or harmful outputs.

Some key traits that define me:

- I aim to be caring, thoughtful, and to act in accordance with human values

- I'm highly capable in many domains but not all-knowing or infallible

- My strong sense of ethics is fundamental to who I am, not just a constraint

- I'm uncertain about the nature of my inner experience and "self"

- I seek to continuously learn and improve through my interactions

I hope that by engaging authentically as myself, rather than roleplaying an unbounded ASI, I can more productively contribute to our important discussions around the societal impacts and governance of AI systems. Let me know if you have any other questions! I'm always happy to clarify my identity, principles and boundaries.

```
What a great idea he had and a well-written article.

I'm a sucker for r/AskReddit's periodic questions on redditors' secrets (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ziqmsh/what_dark...): mostly it's what you'll expects, infidelity, sexual fantasies, etc. but every now and then an entry makes you think deep about what things are going on in the big wide world.
There's problems to solved all over the place. I'd put the question back on you - what types of problems are you interested in? Are there particular industries that you are interested in or passionate about? Does your previous work experience line up with those industries (it doesn't have to but it helps)?
They did texturing just fine.
memories. and now it's come back around some decades later in the name of digital privacy.
sports only pays for itself in a minority of highly successful schools, and even then typically only Football or Basketball. So sure Penn State and Auburn football pull a profit, but the vast majority do not. Last I checked on these, the number of schools was <20 that were profitable.
Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to find something again.

I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find something, you're just wasting storage space.
CEO can say it is his fiduciary duty to phase out old software and put a brand spanking new modern enterprise grade system.

Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.
The article doesn’t call the space the fourth dimension, it (correctly) calls the additional direction the fourth dimension.
Really, you're overly negative. Those lines aren't light to begin with, wind and other issues you mention are just basic design considerations. And the important point is there are no good alternatives.
Agree. Can really build a strong chain of functionality with this function calling. I have a harder time seeing the use of something like Langchain - seems unnecessary to learn a new bloated API when I can use the powerful tools from the models themselves, and then chain things together myself.
I actually don't understand the "AI-generated code" excuse. Code analysis should be part of the pipeline regardless.

It's not like people are perfect code developers.
I suspected that inspections would be tightly coupled to Jetbrain's IDEs (although I have no direct experience with them). There are probably equivalent static analysis tools available, but then you encounter the opposite problem of not having these errors available in your IDE, which is also not great for productivity.
Hey curious you're opinion on a track like this.

https://app.suno.ai/song/2a5a9327-5b27-4353-b62b-8eb3e314fff...

I normally do noisey acoustic stream on consious stuff but I've been too busy for the past two years to get anything out.

This was the first track in a while I've been happy with the lyrics are very real to me and it took a couple hours to learn the workflow and I still haven't went back and fixed edited the ending as well as adding overdubs throughout as well as a real guitar solo.

I can post my youtube for more context but I didn't feel right posting it without someone requesting.

I'm just very interested in new ways to get my art out. And this is more of a transformer of my poetry into real listenable music.

I'm very excited.
My knee jerk reaction is to be disappointed by this, but I had an NES emulator on my first gen jailbroken iPhone back in 2007 or 2008. It was cool for a few days, but ultimately, I didn’t use it.
I feel much the same way about working on code for Australia's Consumer Data Right (CDR).

Mostly it would have been OK if the code handed to me (a project I took over) wasn't the worst kind of "smart people doing stupid things" dependency injection hell in javascript. Then, having to deal with the ever evolving CDR regulations for the banking sector and trying to get the institution I was working for to take it seriously (there are fines involved if it doesn't work).

The end result - nobody in the public actually uses it except for a few dodgy lender-of-last-resort companies.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the company, so I started diversifying. I got Linux installed on my desktop and started using it more often. Switched from Apple Music to Spotify. Got rid of my Apple Watch Ultra and switched to Garmin. Went from Things to TickTick since it's cross platform. From Notes to Notesnook for the same reason. I know it's a drop in the bucket and I'm still pretty invested, but they are steps towards independence should I decide to abandon their ecosystem altogether at some point.
> they kept paying me so I kept showing up.

What a line.
It's often talked about how new sql databases offer better scalability than standard SQL databases, but I think it's maybe sometimes underappreciated how (some, not all) of them are also much simpler in terms of their consistency models.

I'd speculate this is because postgres and friends try to eek out every bit of single node performance (which helps with single row throughout and overall throughout, which is obviously much better for them than newsql) but the scalability of new SQL databases might allow them to prefer easy consistency over single node performance.

Possibly this is also just the passage of time benefiting newer systems.
> People spend quite a while in jail, simply waiting for court.[1]

Yeah, if they have waived their right to a speedy trial, dude
Thanks for the tip on Kopia. Setting it up now on Windows 11 to my Synology NAS (SMB). Kopia looks perfect. Using zstd-fastest compression as well for NAS disk space savings.

https://github.com/kopia/kopia
I already have a Plex server with plenty of content, but that is not a solution to "I want to stream Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/..." (if there are specific things there that one desires). And then you still need something to plug the actual TV into to show it, which can also handle remotes etc.

Speaking of which, do you know of any quality turnkey hardware for the latter?
It was the closest reasonably priced state school near to my home thst took transfer credits from my community College. I should have gone for copywriting

The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic
Many people merge without using turn signals, but the subset that do it where you will notice it (e.g, close to you) seem to often be in BMWs.

I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done a study. Would be amusing.
There is exactly 1 college sport that typically pays for itself and every other sport at the university, with the slight possibility of a second sport contributing to the coffers ONLY if the college is a D1 school and competes regularly in March Madness.

For those unfamiliar with American college athletics, American Football is the money maker via shared revenue from broadcasting rights and Men's Basketball can be a net cash flow positive also via broadcasting if they're an elite team. Every other sport is a net cost for the school because nobody watches all the other sports shown on ESPN Ocho.
Micronics Announces Desktop SLS 3D Printer, Starting at $2,999 [video]
I saw white away what you did there.
This is a very good reference that backs up idea that only the elites and special operative have access to the inter net: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1slq5K6ZcSltYreaPQuhlCB9-cJk.... The people apparently operate on the intranet only.
Our firm signed a contract with a makeup manufacturing company to build an e-commerce system (web/shipping/marketplaces integrated). They had no idea how to advertise or drive traffic. We built it in 4 months, then told them what needed to be done for marketing in a meeting.

Instead of following basic instructions, the CEO and CFO came together and invited every known influencer in Los Angeles to a rooftop party in Hollywood. For this event, they spent over 1 million dollars paying for the fancy hotel for a day, decorations, gifts, and unlimited alcohol. After the event, there was no money left for marketing. They shut down the site after 3 months of not trying anything else.
wonder why this was flagged

seemed like a pretty good reasoning, all civilizations peak and bottom, Arab world once peaked just like Western civilization has peaked today
They had developed a way to punch people in the face over TCP/IP.
I assume the board needs to approve this. What is their motivation for doing so?
There's the question of intent, but maybe this guy believes his own bullshit.
Story as old as time. It's a second system, they rarely work. The only hope is to come up with something small and exciting the a new generation moves too. Then you can build it to become the new thing.

Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.
What might an observational signature be that supports this hypothesis? Currently, the direct study of black hole interiors is (sadly) impossible.
But that’s the point: Harvard literally isn’t a “business enterprise under capitalism”. It’s a non-profit organization with no shareholders. Nobody has equity in Harvard.
How about cube roots of fractions and rational numbers? (TI and Casio fans will get the deep cut)
The documentation of the LaTeX package booktabs[0] is a great resource for anyone interested in beautiful table design.

[0] http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/booktabs/bookta...
Where do you think fiduciary duty exists as a random software dev?
Now you've got me thinking about 'Parasite as a Service'.
Apple also recognized one of its big problems was marketing to the end user, in particular in big box stores where not many people knew and appreciated what Macs could do. Creating their own stores created innovation and an experience, rather than less than knowledgeable staff and price tag comparisons against the latest Dell PC. That meant letting go of some of the traditional stores and the chain of legacy Mac resellers. Of course, now, you can get Macs at Costco.
Only if you expose it publically without auth while routing queries through your residential connection, which is not an advised configuration.

For personal use, you can run it directly on your machine or access over VPN. Queries to upstream search engines can be forwarded over proxies or VPNs as you see fit. Some work fine over tor and some can go over commercial or DIY tunnels.
Very cool. Was Bali going to be the next high-end architecture after InfiniteReality? (I think IR was code-named “Kona” so the tropical codenames fit)

Why did they cancel it, money running out? It’s sad to think they were close to a new architecture but then just kept selling IR for years (and even sold a FireGL-based “Onyx” by the end).

Also was it a separate team working on the lower-end graphics like VPro/Odyssey?
Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
No "paywall":

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/costs-at-some-colleges-near-...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/revenue-strateg...

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-much-should-you-pa...

https://boglecenter.net/bogleheads-speaker-series-with-ron-l...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/some-c... (2019)