skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the tokenizer, information about the training data, etc. They, more than anyone else, are responsible for the explosion of open research and improvement that has happened with things like llama.cpp that now allow you to run quite decent models locally on consumer hardware in a way that you can avoid any censorship or controls.

Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it.

Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models.

Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!
I am highly interested how they managed to get the code certified.

I once was told that flight critical components of those aircrafts have to be verified using formal methods. That is at odds with everything I know about modern machine learning.

But maybe the plane is operated by a kernel machine…
A year ago, I got hired at this place that is, shall we say, less than stellar at teaching their new hires about their custom, specialized code framework.

Of course only new hires notice. Maybe only new hires who have been enough places to realize that it doesn't have to be this hard...
Do bootcamps still have a value in 2024?
There is nothing "inevitable" about Taiwan falling. China would have to take an inexperienced military and accomplish one of the hardest things imaginable, an amphibious invasion that can only happen in narrow time windows at handful of spots on an island that consists mostly of mountains, jungle and dense urban areas.

It's so hard a task that in World War II the Allied forces (with a ton more experience, and a far more favorable balance of power, chose to invade Okinawa instead, where the US "only" suffered forty eight thousand battlefield casualties. This was still a lot less than the projected causalities of attacking a ridiculously underdefended Taiwan.

The reason for TSMC to diversify is that Xi might be foolish enough to try this, and erratic and isolationist politicians in the US might fail to deter him. Taiwan doesn't have to fall for TSMC to gravely harm TSMC and the global economy, they merely have to start a war.
All of my friends are ending their marriages
I visited conservatoire des arts et metiers museum in Paris a couple years ago. It is full of fascinating scientific devices from the past. Among then was the timbre analyser. I was blown away. A purely analogic spectrum analyser.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Timbre_analyser-CNAM...
The definition of the word Matzo is "unleavened bread", so your question is not well formed.
Whereas we wait for our laggards to be on the brink of failure before supporting them with bailouts.
With quantized models you can run 70B models on 64GB RAM comfortably.
I'm trying to figure out where 539 hurricanes is coming from? That's over an order of magnitude more than there's ever been in a single season...
https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN_Review/comments/18jsm26/best_vp...

I see a bunch of it here
They who? I've had dozens of customers, and multiple employers, and co-founded several companies. Most of them had servers in multiple redundant data centres worldwide. None owned any data centres because it rarely pays - owning data centres is a real estate play, not a tech play, which is why you also increasingly see real-estate management companies pick up data centre operators. Unless you're spending in the billions, it's rarely worth it when the markup is a tiny fraction of what you're paying for space and power.

Some w/rented servers. Some leased. Some owned. Some with staff on retainer just for us. Some just w/support contracts and remote hands. In some cases we rented office space for ops people in the colo facility, because again: They're real estate plays and the big ones have office suites available.
Russia did not stop after 3 days, didn’t it? And there is no indication it will stop any time soon.
Russia is also old and broke, but it had enough to keep going. And Russia needs to spend a much higher percentage of the GDP on war than China.
I’m pretty sure China can take Taiwan if it wants to, I just hope the estimated price will be too high for them to actually pull the trigger.
Or how it took Google ages to address the scam "You Win!" YouTube comments disguised as if coming from the videos' posters. How hard could that be, exactly?
Open weight models do more for AI safety than any other measure by far, as the most serious threath is never going to be misuse, but abuse of unequal access.
Wtf are you talking about? China is the world's largest maker and exporter for drones. Their swarms will easily annihilate anything US/Japan/Taiwan on their way.

The only question is what costs more: taking Taiwan by force or developing Chinas own tech and watching TSMC go broke.

Also: quotation needed. Who and when said "the war would end in 3 days."?
Yep. Advanced military technology tends to favor countries with high GDP per capita, which are mostly liberal democracies.
Going from expendable to reusable rockets will be a transition similar to the transition from silent movies to sound movies.

Many of the old stars of the field won't survive the change.
Yes, with a simple upgrade to debian.
Even Max Verstappen uses it (albeit indirectly):

https://github.com/nasa/openmct/discussions/6392
As an american everyone has an opinion, and belongs to some sort of clique.

China has state media, censorship, and there are some very loud voices that parrot what the party wants. I have the understanding that many Chinese see through a lot of the bullshit (and because of personal experience at that).

What there has been is more protests in china. From the white paper to recent wage protests. It's getting harder to cover over the dissatisfaction and people are being vocal. And the youth movement of lying flat is fascinating in light of the demographics.

The colapse there is going to be sudden, sharp and will impact the globe.
Also, he's lying about Spotify not being treated like Facebook in that case (for data protection).

Other people here try the same idiotic take on Rgpd 'protectionism' but do not even think to look at active Rgpd cases. This guy is worse though, directly talking about Spotify and didn't bother to check, if you cannot be trusted to do basic research on your arguments, on your own blog, you shouldn't be listened to.
If I'm trying to anticipate the future and had to choose between trusting the very expensive, very disruptive actions of nation states and multinationals as they prepare for (minimally) a trade break with China, and a handful of articles from relatively small publications (and reddit!) that say it's nothing to worry about, I'm going to go with the former.

That doesn't mean the nations and corporations are right, but the world is reconfiguring as if they were either way.
This is one of my favorites:

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/i-am-unable-to-accept-your-...
Once you discover a mastering error in a song (or get told about it) it might ruin the song.
LLMs are excellent at presenting more common diagnoses first. With Google you can easily find some rare and scary disease that fits your symptoms, that trips up a lot of casual Googlers.
AI is not your friend, it is the corporation's friend. AGI by meaning means "do what humans do, even better". AGI === cheaper human that takes no breaks, doesn't get sick, needs no benefits.

If AGI gets here faster than natural decline in human population, we are fucked! Likely scenario is that it will.

The divide between poor and rich is ever growing, middle-class being eroded. If you are an employee, you are never secure.

Not worth sacrificing your health and relationships for a job, unless they are paying you $$$$ worth early retirement.
Israel are defending themselves, showing considerable restraint in difficult circumstances. The actions of Hamas are genocide as they were and are indiscriminately targeting and attacking Jewish people.
However, you will miss a couple of rather cool transitions from line-drawn images to moving photographic images. It is reminscent of rotoscoping, but not the same. I sense a new art form, similar to when those GIFs with only a single moving object appeared some years ago.
For a startup I ran, we too built an HPC cluster on AWS. It was very much a big win, as sourcing and installing that amount of kit would have been far too much upfront.

I should have really mentioned your(our) use case, as smallish department without dedicated access to a cluster or people who can run a real steel cluster.

AWS's one click lustre clustre service (FSx) combined with Batch is a really quick and powerful basic HPC cluster.

Before we got bought out, we had planned for creating a "base load" of real steel machines to process the continuous jobs, and spin up the rest of the cluster as and when demand needed
EU? I live in south america and don't have access either, Facebook is just showing what the US plans to do, weaponize AI in the future and give itself accesss first.
errr, '95 OKC bombing. <facepalm> I'd love to call it a typo, but I definitely misremembered the date.
It amazes me how people can make snarky comments like this given what's going on in Ukraine. Militaries need to exist precisely so some dictator like Putin can't wake up one day on a whim and be like "you don't deserve to exist; I'm going to take over your country." You can either live in this reality or bask in some imagined smug moral superiority. Your choice.
No, but there's a reason so many adjacent libraries and software packages name themselves after Llama (Ollama, llama.cpp, etc)
One big problem with the article's proposal to steal momentum from Jupiter to move Earth to a larger orbit is that it is an energy absorbing process. In other words, there has to be an external source of energy to move momentum from Jupiter to Earth. This is because the ratio of specific energy to specific momentum is higher for lower orbits than it is for higher orbits. In other words, the closer you are to the Sun, the more energy you get for a specific amount of momentum (because the gravity is stronger there). This is assuming near circular orbits.

So, you can gain energy by moving momentum from Earth to Jupiter, but you lose it the other way. Another planet, such as Saturn, would be needed as an energy donor (moving momentum from Jupiter to Saturn, then using the excess energy to move momentum from Jupiter to Earth) to make the energy equation balance.
Yes. "If you do not want the Settings app to nag you with Microsoft Account prompts, go to Privacy > General and toggle off the "Show me suggested content in the Settings app" option."
>China is telling people Trump will abandon Taiwan, and you believed their propaganda? Amazing how that works.

Gotta read that again; not propaganda. This isn't some straight forward meaning to their words.

>The last person China wants is Trump. Trump already said he would increase tariffs on China. He also said he would ban the sell of Chinese cars in the United States. Not to mention, he said he sanction China for selling weapons to Russia, which Biden hasn't done.

China is in a economic depression and probably going to be near its bottom by the end of the year. The fear of tariffs is far lower today and realistically not that necessary.

As I said though, 'suddenly' which essentially I agree with you, but it recently switched.
This patently false, you should do more research before you make comments to inflate your ego.

For your education:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAT64
> Why didn't it ever have the impact that LLMs are having now?

Google has its own Knowledge Graph, with billions of daily views, which is wider but more shallow version of Cyc. It is unclear if LLM user facing impact surpassed that project.
eBay enters trading card commercial agreement with Collectors, acquires Goldin
For what it's worth, my son has this injury (severe brain trauma), approximately 30% of brain is non existent.
He doesn't have PTSD as it happened when he was a baby along with a large number of complications.
I got PTSD with all of the multiple surgeries (and wishing goodbyes), EVDs, shunts, life and death decisions, and witnessing near death on a few occasions for him over months. The only positive is I can see PTSD in other people from once having it myself, and it is heartbreaking because I know exactly what they are going through too.
the problem with saying that war is impossible is that it always looks impossible before it happens.

while Ukraine hasn't been taken over, their economy isn't exactly doing hot since everything is at risk of bombardment. Likewise, it's likely that even if Taiwan were not to immediately fall, that TSMC facilities would be damaged, and even if they weren't, it would be a major danger to ship anything out of Taiwanese ports; shipping out of Odesa has not been smooth sailing.
Limiting the maximum size of Amanda debug logs with a Linux tmpfs mount
“Communicative Agents for Software Development,” Qian et al. (2023) (the ChatDev paper)
“AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation,” Wu et al. (2023)
“MetaGPT: Meta Programming for a Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework,” Hong et al. (2023)
Wow, amazing. Why does this work? I would think that the nail bed has no knowledge of what the end of the nail is shaped like.
Probably won't. As long as they stick to things that are already 'enshittifying' at warp speed (like customer support) there won't be any real consequences to bottom line because everyone they're competing with is racing to the bottom anyway.
Yes, I think I have been "that guy" when I walk into a situation I have been hired to fix, I want to get started right away.

If I see a common problem, I want to fix it immediately and say something like "I see big batch sizes all the time and they have a simple, counter intuitive fix. In fact, of you had read more than 30 minutes, you would see it addressed."
It’s not a spectrum. Woke people are like Bangladeshis—they categorize individuals based on race/ethnicity. In 2024, unlike maybe when you grew up, the only people calling me “colored” are woke white people.

White republicans are, for the most part, non-racist. Once you establish points of commonality with them, they do not care or comment on what you look like.
Robotic Cocktail Dress [video]
yeah, I think in retrospect maybe part of the confusion is that some people's definition of brainwashing is only the torture/drugs definition, while mine and yours presumably has always included propaganda and other purely psychological means.

But its hard to convince someone ads are brainwashing when to their mind its just completely obviously something else.

In the end its all language games anyways when we hopefully should all be able to agree that it's a problem that 20% of the GDP to be spent trying to control our thoughts
Seems like a year or two of MMA has done way more for his charisma than whatever media training he's done over the years. He's a lot more natural in interviews now.
Democratic elections are a farce in general, only the $$ power behind allow candidates to run, right now it's always pro democracy candidates because the money behind them want them to, once the money comes from mainland China it becomes pro integration candidates.

Anyone who believes otherwise is blind to reality.
In a way I'm kind of glad of the recent acceleration in Windows's enshittification, because it's now got me to the point where my Steam library is the only thing I haven't yet migrated to NixOS!
Imagine if China starts with blowing up TSMC with long-range weapons. How will the West react if Taiwan no longer has that leverage?
Before Russia actually invaded Ukraine I was more optimistic about this.
If you read the article, and didn't think to get a little more information the SS Great Eastern, mentioned early on as the first cable repair vessel, here you go:

https://historicaldigression.com/2011/03/28/the-great-easter...
A16Z doubles gaming investment with $600M fund as part of $7.2B fundraise
also it's not named horizontal and vertical because it depends on the direction of the text - some text reads vertically
>My understanding is that insurance companies have fixed profit margins by law

Right. And (IIUC) those profits are set at 10% of revenue, not revenue - costs.

That creates perverse incentives to increase premiums above all else.
Long-Acting Drugs May Revolutionize HIV Prevention
Really? Is Llama 2 (70b?) better than Claude 3 sonnet?
Yes, it's correct, but it's not the oven, it's the flour and water that control it.

Basically in the past matzo was made the day it was used because it would spoil otherwise (like any bread), but making matzo came with the risk of creating leaven which was a serious prohibition on Pesach itself.

So it's better to make it in advance, before Pesach, so they switched to dry/hard matzo that can keep forever.

These days there are freezers, and some groups make small quantities of the matzo the old way, and then freeze. It's not easy to get.
Transport fantasies that never got off the ground
The US would never go to war against China. It is simply unrealistic.

It'd be calibrated support like we're seeing in Ukraine but no direct engagement.
The OSI definition applies to source code -- I'm not sure the term "open source" makes much sense applied to model weights.

Whilst I agree the term isn't ideal, I don't agree with the other comments in the post I originally replied to.
Oh please, what? There’s nothing wrong or malicious or un-open with running a business by selling content online. You’re deeply confusing open and free. A marketplace built on open standards is still open.

Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers.

Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.
> I was reading about survey grade compasses, and they are balanced to account for magnetic dip, the closer you get to the poles the more dip you have.

Wet, or whiskey compasses used in aircraft are counterweighted to account for this. There are mnemonics for pilots to know how to handle the error induced by this counterweight: "OSUN—overshoot south, undershoot north" and "ANDS—accelerate north, decelerate south".

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2012/may/flight...
Writing as Labor: Doing More with Less, Together
You can see from Zuck's interviews that he is still an engineer at heart. Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership.
Recent? Hasn't it been going strong for well over ten years? Windows 8 was released in 2012.
I appreciate that, but it requires creating an account, and for people who have a gazillion other things to be doing, taking the time to create Yet Another Account on Yet Another System just for the one article is something most people will pass on.

It may not have a financial cost, but it certainly has an opportunity cost, and contributes to "Account Fatigue".

But loved the proof of Heron's formula, and I'm pleased to be able to say thank you in person, and make sure I give credit when I use it for the Math Club talks I do.

Great work ... feel free to contact me if you are so inclined, or put an email address in your profile.
TerraPower plans to build first US next-generation nuclear plant
I asked it to count to infinity and it is attempting.

Errored out after hitting 510. At least its entertaining.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3/ has it about a third of the way down. It's a little bit better on every benchmark than Mixtral 8x22B (according to Meta).
1. Go here: https://www.thetruesize.com/

2. Type in "Taiwan"

3. Type in "Ukraine"

4. Overlap them.

5. Go here: https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php

6. Find China & Russia

7. Now find Taiwan & Ukraine.

8. Ratio China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine.
> You wouldn't happen to work in a related industry, would you?

No, and this is a bit of a giveaway that you're not thinking clearly. Just goodies vs baddies nonsense.

> rrent practices like locked engines, propeitary versions of standard interfaces, drm in printer cartridges, deliberately overbundled parts, deliberate incompatibility doing things like reversing screw threads on one type of screw for no mechanical benefit, planned obsolecence, etc don't support your take

I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good. The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.

Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.

> Considering the current state is needlessly buying an entirely new device every time something breaks, which not only costs money, it uses a ton of resources, and the alternative is better engineered products and competitive local repair options, I don't think it will be a hard sell

You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive. This is why Framework laptops aren't as appealing as other laptops if you factor out repairability.
>>I'll ask why things on the list are that way, and how they got to be that way. I'm trying to establish credibility as someone who's genuinely curious and empathetic, who's patient, and who respects the expertise of my coworkers. That's the reputation that's going to let me make changes later.

Seems like an excellent corollary to Chesterton's Fence, about someone who comes upon a fence they want to remove:

"If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it"

Or, more explicitly: "Although this looks out of place, we do best to assume that those who came before us were intelligent, and there is a reason for it. That reason may be obsolete, but it must be accounted for or we'll simply repeat a mistake."
I suspect that military aviation has a different certification path. Especially for R+D such as this.
"There are only two kinds of paranoia: Total... and _insufficient_."
Games work pretty good on NixOS right now, just FYI (if you have good GPU drivers, that is). I've gotten pretty much everything working that I was able to get running on other distros. The biggest issue is native Linux titles, but most of those work fine with Steam Linux Runtime selected.

Just sayin'. If you're not a chronic Destiny 2 or R6 Siege player, hop on in, the water's fine!