skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why does the prompt intro take the form of a role/identity directive "You are helpful assistant..."?

What about the training sets or the model internals responds to this directive?

What are the degrees of freedom of such directives?

If such a directive is helpful, why wouldn't more demanding directives be even more helpful: "You are a domain X expert who provides proven solutions for problem type Y..."

If don't think the latter prompt is more helpful, why not?

What aspect of the former prompt is within bounds of helpful directives that the latter is not?

Are training sets structured in the form of roles? Surely, the model doesn't identify with a role?!

Why is the role directive topically used with NLP but not image generation?

Do typical prompts for Stable Diffusion start with an identity directive "You are assistant to Andy Warhol in his industrial phase..."?

Why can't improved prompt directives be generated by the model itself? Has no one bothered to ask it for help?

"You are the world's most talented prompt bro, write a prompt for sentience..."

If the first directive observed in this post is useful and this last directive is absurd, what distinguishes them?

Surely there's no shortage of expert prompt training data.

BTW, how much training data is enough to permit effective responses in a domain?

Can a properly trained model answer this question? Can it become better if you direct it to be better?

Why can't the models rectify their own hallucinations?

To be more derogatory: what distinguishes a hallucination from any other model output within the operational domain of the model?

Why are hallucinations regarded as anything other than a pure effect, and as pure effect, what is the cusp of hallucination? That a human finds the output nonsensical?

If outputs are not equally valid in the LLM why can't it sort for validity?

OTOH if all outputs are equally valid in the LLM, then outputs must be regarded by a human for validity, so what distinguishes a LLM from an the world's greatest human time-wasting device? (After Las Vegas)

Why will a statistical confidence level help avoid having a human review every output?

The questions go on and on...

—
Parole Board chairman: They've got a name for people like you H.I. That name is called "recidivism."

Parole Board member: Repeat offender!

Parole Board chairman: Not a pretty name, is it H.I.?

H.I.: No, sir. That's one bonehead name, but that ain't me any more.

Parole Board chairman: You're not just telling us what we want to hear?

H.I.: No, sir, no way.

Parole Board member: 'Cause we just want to hear the truth.

H.I.: Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear.

Parole Board chairman: Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?

H.I.: Yes, sir.

Parole Board chairman: Okay, then.
Is that 2 degrees of cooling gross or net the predicted warming? i.e. is that 2 degrees below pre-industrial levels, or is it x-2 where x is warming due to global warming ≈ about pre-industrial levels.
The glibc separation into multiple shared libraries is such a weird thing. Anyone happen to know how that happened? See musl for an example where they put it all in one lib and thus avoid a whole pile of failure modes.
or her
Yeah, I get what you are saying. But I guess I'm living in "survival" mindset, and realize that at any moment I might have to move, meaning I'll be able to take only important things with me. A NAS is usually not important, nor convenient to take.

However, as I was writing this, I thought that I could use a Mini PC with an additional HDD or two (for raid redundancy), and in case of whatever reason I'll have to move, I can just take the hard drives with me.

As for Google/iCloud. iCloud is easier to take out your data, it's literally a folder on the machine, in addition to the fact that Google ruins the metadata of photos (it took me a few days to fully merge it back with a help of some script off GitHub).
Essentially path dependency. It would be almost impossible to change how it works now.
I don’t understand why people like this are considered “squatters” and not trespassers. They should be removed by force if unwilling to go peacefully.
It's an argument for example setting, that this is the consequence of causing such an enormous amount of harm to society, including indirect and possibly direct deaths, for nothing put personal material gain. Deterrence. And the amount of damage these acts cause mean that even a 1% improvement in reducing the rate at which this happens, is worth it. The general problem with the death penalty is the risk of wrongful convictions, which is indeed a huge problem when applying it for things such as simple murder, as parts of the US have shown time and time again. Luckily, when talking about this kind of case, that's pretty much not an issue. "Whoops, we got the wrong person who stole $27 billion, it was actually someone else from a different town who looked similar!" is not something you'll hear. Framing someone in this way to get them killed is also a hilarious hypothetical, a less efficient way to get rid of someone is hardly imaginable.

I'd go as far as to say it's outrageous to argue that someone capable of the above is not dangerous to society and how they would have a foreseeable path to freedom. Their freedom would indeed come at a big risk of repeat grave harm to society. Another problem with imprisonment in cases like these is that these are exactly the cases which end up getting pardoned X years from now because parts of the power structure that they built up are still in place and will at some point come in politically handy for an opportunist.

>When their freedom means others are likely be assaulted and killed if they are allowed to go free again.

"Made to commit suicide" should be equivalent to killed here, and that is the case.
Maybe in some cases but I often see founders getting diluted a lot as well.

Many times when startups get acquired/whatever - founders will get next to nothing because the investors had liquidation preferences. The founders still go through with it though cause it allows you to start another company and raise rounds. If you become known as a founder who prioritizes himself over his investors - who is going to give you money…?
IIRC they have a young girl on stage at the IgNobels and her job is to repeatedly shout 'boring' if you overrun your timeslot.
What's the difference between "getting confused" and "lying" in a predictive model?

Normally lying means conveying a falsehood that you know is a falsehood with the intent to deceive. Both the 'know it's a falsehood' and the 'intent to deceive' are important criteria when asking whether a human was lying or not, and an LLM seems like it cant satisfy those and so can't 'lie'.
So true! I tried at least 4 songs they are all lame in the same way it hurts my ears couldnt get past 10 seconds.
Still its quite an achievement well done developer! I mean we cant expect real creativity out of a lifeless machine can we.
This opinion is the reason that cancel culture exists today, and why academics are increasingly finding it difficult to have intelligent debates about taboo subjects.

Have an example:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/12/this-isnt-ho...
... I had it tough, therefore others should too? What if those others had it tougher than you? have you apologized to them for having it so much easier?

Or, hear me out, maybe the goal should be for tomorrow to be better than today, or yesterday, and that definitionally means a lot of stuff gets easier.

Complaining as you're doing here is the same as saying "this cancer treatment should be banned because I lost family members to cancer when it wasn't available, and it's unfair for cancer patients today to have it easier than we did"

Also as an addendum because you're pulling the I had it tough card: my parents had me as teenagers, then they were uni students with no money until I was 6 or 7, and I was deaf, had severe asthma, and so was relentlessly bullied due to a lisp I had because, you know, I was deaf until I was 5. We lived in a house that would be better described as a shed - corrugated steel walls and siding, etc we were not anywhere near "middle class". Guess what: I still think people should not have to go through that just because I did.

JFC.
Remember: LLMs are basically trained to be really gifted improv actors. That's what all that "guess the next token" training boils down to. Once that base of "improv" is established, they're then trained to play a specific role, "the helpful and harmless assistant". Somehow this produces useful output much of the time, as ridiculous as it seems.

But whenever almost anything goes wrong, LLMs fall back to improv games. It's like you're talking to the cast of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" You set the scene, and the model tries to play along.

So a case like this proves almost nothing. If you ask an improv actor "What's the last question you were asked?", then they're just going to make something up. So will these models. If you give a model a sentence with 2 grammatical errors, and ask it to find 3, it will usually make up a third error. If it doesn't know the answer to a question, it will likely hallucinate.

GPT-4 is a little better at resisting the urge to make things up.
> If partying is a problem, they should be able to talk to a doctor about it, and it should be paid for as a part of the services provided by society.

I feel like I'm on an alien planet here. We should pay for people to get lifestyle advice?

This is malinvestment. Put that money into research instead.
But. They can be paid as salaries. :)
Show HN: Open-source keyboard-only ASCII diagram builder TUI
I'm a visual person, and I easily express myself using diagrams. I thought, why not use diagrams in code comments? It has to be ASCII, and there are existing online solutions, but I want something simple in the terminal that allows me to use the keyboard. I couldn't find one, so I built this.

I know it could be sexier if written in Rust, but I used Python to keep it simple and approachable. It's less than 800 lines of code and fully type-annotated.

Let me know what you think!
Great points. But you missed the mark. The discussion is about taxes not if religions should own hospitals. The same poor people you mention have to pay taxes while the religious organizations get special cuts. If we are blind to how profitable and mutually beneficial relationships hospitals and insurance companies have, there is nothing else to discuss.
Zora
The future is already here. As a tech lead, consulting for one of my clients, I have to oversee the maintenance of three JS-heavy projects (backend too) that are imploding under their own weight of technical debt. And a good part of that are dependencies.
Also disrespectful to any speakers that have to follow.
Really the big finding here is that Xlib et. al. get pulled in to GPU compute tools, because access to GPU contexts has traditionally been mediated by the desktop subsystem, because the GPU was traditionally "owned" by the rendering layers of the device abstraction.

The bug here is much more a changing hardware paradigm than it is an issue with shared library dependencies that recapitulate it. Things moved and the software layers kludged along instead of reworking from scratch.

Obviously what's needed is a layer somewhere in the device stack that "owns" the GPU resources and doles them out to desktop rendering and compute clients as needed, without the two needing to know about each other. But that's a ton more work than just untangling some symbol dependencies!
Fine porcelain maker Maruwa becomes the hottest bet for cooling AI data centres
Because nothing was already called "stack"?
not looking for a job at this time but i do this kind of work - what is the name of the team that you are working on / typically works on this?
1) change your environment temporarily

2) let new perspective come to you

3) implement what your own introspection tells you

I've seen successful people become addicted to drugs because they let their minds idle and they lost perspective.

Remember the devil doesn't come with bulls and horns. It comes bearing gifts to hook you in.
I wonder how people will react when Netflix starts enforcing two factor auth for logins. You know, industry best practice to stop cred stuffing.
This is very interesting! Are there any movements to move towards this?

Wouldn't it open up for a new attack vector where process could read each other data?
I moved from southern California, where the ocean was west, to Santa Cruz, where it was south, to San Francisco, where if you're looking at water the only thing you know is you're not looking south, and that's about when I gave up.
Not OP, and have only ever made hobby games in GDScript, but here are a few I'd be concerned with:

- GDScript objects are very heavy, as the base class of objects are a bit heavy (by their own admission). So having a lot of them can lead to memory/performance issues.

- GDScript is best when you’re using the optional typings, but there are certain operations that make this a pain (e.g., Arrays can be typed such as Array[int], but most functions will return an untyped array, as well complex types such as Array[Array[int]] and Dictionary[String, int] are not supported. Generics are also unsupported.)

- Coming from a Python background, GDScript is just close enough to Python to feel familiar, but just different enough that half the things you’d expect to work don’t. It can be a bit taxing keeping them straight in your head if you try to use both frequently in different contexts.

- The editor itself is missing a lot of IDE creature comforts such as code formatting.

These are just a few off the top of my head. None is enough to make me abandon Godot or GDScript, but would wear on me in a larger project.
There’s also a weird dynamic where this applies to production but not consumption. I can’t remember which, but there’s a social media site that is donation based. Every year they do a fundraising drive. Every year the users flip out they would try to raise money with Everything Going On Right Now.

The founder posted on their blog about how every year has things going on, and they still need to raise money. And the users completely backlash against all forms of monetization.

What I didn’t see anyone mention is the users are still using the site. Apparently using the site is really important. Just not making it, or earning a living while making it.
> Have you ever seen an old 2x4? This isn't "large beam" but it's obviously higher-quality than new 2x4s.

The 2x4 was decreased in size below 2x4 in the 1920s because shipping costs started dominating lumber prices because we’d depleted the forests near the cities where demand was greatest. It was further reduced during the second world war because building of necessity became standardized and again shipping volume was of primacy.

The US forest labs did tons of tests on this in the 1920s fwiw proving there was no quality difference.

Now there are many fine homes left from prior to these changes, but there are many many more crap homes that are gone because they weren’t capable of lasting. These are the homes you should be comparing to the average home built today.

But you mostly can’t. When you can, as in my example, you will find the older homes were built to similar specs as today from a structural stand point but much lower spec on systems, finish and especially size.

This doesn’t even touch on tenement apartments where most of the population lived in cities (the place housing costs have swelled the most).

These would quite literally be considered incapable of being housing now.

I am certainly not an expert on housing but my father was professionally and I did help my grandfather add an addition to our family farm house that was from the 1910s, when it was literally 1 room without plumbing (they’d done a previous remodel in the 60s to add bedrooms and plumbing, the materials from that remodel were not significantly different than the materials we used in the 90s).
> one of this means I want decisions now made by someone who does 4 years of college, 4 years of med school, 3-7 years of residency and potentially fellowship on top of that to instead be made by a nurse "under the supervision" of a doctor.

That is indeed the AMA the talking point to justify their stance. However my problem with the AMA here isn't that they support some scope restrictions (clearly many decisions do require full training) but that they strongly support ALL scope restrictions without data to support such a rigid hardline stance. They do this even when the loosening scope restrictions would decrease cost and increase availability without any harm to patient outcomes. This absolutely exacerbates the physician supply problem that the AMA created. If the AMA actually care about the physician supply issues in the country, it would work with state and federal regulators to identify which scope restrictions can safely be loosened.
Such corporate structures are often set up for the express purpose of optimizing tax. Replacing corporate tax with dividend tax would remove incentives from setting up such structures, which is a good thing.

Apart from that, double taxation is a reality for natural persons since they have to pay income tax and VAT. Corporations are usually not subject to the latter.
The most reasonable explanation is that it allucinated it, was trained to answer that or it was in the prompt.

These models are stateless, they don't remember anything, they are read only. If they can remember previous messages is just because the prompt is the concatenation of the new prompt and something like "summarize this conversation: {whole messages in conversation}".

(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, but nowhere near anything related with copilot.)
Our family was heading somewhere specific in the countryside with multiple cars and our pre-GPS relatives insisted on driving as a convoy. They wanted to show us exactly where to drive instead of just agreeing on a time and a place and "see you there".

And it totally makes sense. If you don't have navigation software arriving at a specific place in a small village somewhere in the countryside where you have never been would be super stressful. They probably thought they are doing us a solid by leading us there.
It’s like dealing with the old Angular 1 and Meteor projects from 2015
Neopets' nostalgic revival tripled users in six months
Had the same thought when I read the title. Then "Ah, the old non-profit that's really a for-profit in disguise." A tale as old as dimes (and nickels). Bricks also (the gold variety).

Notably, article written by: Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Carey Business School. Even some of the doctors don't seem to like the situation much.

Be weird being a doctor where you didn't like your own hospital's priorities very much, except I read those doctor/nursing stories all the time. The UK situation's been so depressing I mostly avoid those articles when I check the Guardian.

The profit motive (or disguised non-profit cousin) has also been leading to what seems like not sane work hours of 12+ shifts in a lot of cases, which is another issue [1]. The nurses seem to hate it, the staff say its not safe, yet the profit says 12h shifts.

[1] https://human-resources-health.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
But the government broke the university pricing model by guaranteeing all student loans are practically non-dischargeable through bankruptcy and then double down on their stupidity with forgiving those student loans. The government when led by naive, busy body do-gooders almost always reach the lowest optimal point.
My head is more secure than any database, but it is lossy.
In my experience, dry-runs, at least in front of an insider audience, are not a real assessment of the content, nor the delivery. It doesn't feel natural as in front of the real audience. Any I rarely get any useful feedback anyway: always some stupid, non-consequential remarks that tend to turn everything to corporate speak with no allowance for personal style.

Fad of the day at my company is evidence-assertion style. And I am sick of it...
One example is that in Presto, joins assume that left (IIRC) table is the big one you stream, and the right one is the small one you hash. One of the newer features was that in some cases, the optimizer is able to ignore the SQL order and correctly pick which table to hash and which one to stream.
> While with healthcare, nobody goes checking for yelp reviews of ambulance companies when they break their leg.

In most progressive states, ambulance rates have to be set and approved by the Department of Health, at least. While not free market, as you suggest, this is also done for consumer protection (though I'll grant that many will argue that more could be done).
well done good luck with it!
Yes that’s what I was suggesting. However, it’s worth remembering that some people kill quite often so there’s real costs to having extremely high standards.

Which doesn’t mean we should do the old convict a random drifter in the area, just acknowledge there’s real negative consequences in both directions.
Convex cofounder here. Yep the database transaction logic, timestamp assignment, concurrency control, etc is all custom. This is a pretty key requirement in our ability to perform dynamic subscriptions and automatic caching in real time.

Internally the very bottom of the stack on the hosted product is actually just a write ahead log on RDS and in the open source product it's just sqlite. We'll likely eventually build our own durable write ahead log, and have plenty of experience doing so, but this hasn't been needed so far.
can you share what the tech stack here is? i would say change up the designs more, i just see a drop down on the first screen.
Models can be stateless while the API/UI has state, which can leak
Our lab build and characterized one of the first low cost mobile PM sensing devices and worked with a major manufacturer of reference devices. I think the article is partially over simplifying. This is because also the reference devices do some tricks to derive mass concentration. Real mass concentration can only be measured at a low frequency by using actual filters that absorb the PM in the correct size category. Optical and beta attenuation devices are actually calibrated. The question is if the translation of absorption and count is actually so stable against mass. If you use other types of sensors like nephelometers you can for sure get different readings, however: are they really more wrong? Particularly if due to the measurement pricinciple a higher resolution is in the data. If you would want to measure mass concentration you would need to compare against real mass concentration and aggregate values. I am not sure if high resolution RSME is really helpful as a metric here. Constantly in place calibrated low cost sensors are often quite good. But this does not tell so much about their quality. In the end it is what you want to do with the sensor. For regulatorybpurposes (measuring e.g urban background) the placement of the sensor is often more important than the accuracy. If you want to discover relative and transient effects a well calibrated network of dense low-cost sensors might be a fit. In the end you cannot even easily translate exposure to harm, because it the material of your PM very likely will also matter (we are just assuming the typical mix in most cities when deriving limits)
The point is that there is an information imbalance, which enables one side to have more power in negotiating. Sure I can say "give me more money" but if the employer presumes I have little information on my co-workers, they can just say no. But if I call the bluff and say, I want more money because I know a co-worker makes X, it is harder to say no for the employer, although obviously not impossible.
What made a big difference for me recently was biking more - both because I couldn't reference the map while moving and because I had to pay a lot more attention to what was going on around me while biking. I had a pretty good sense of my city before, but now even when driving I skip the GPS most times.