skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
John Nagle has posted insightful comments about the historical background for this many times, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947 referenced in the article. He's a prolific HN commenter (#11 on the leaderboard) so it can be hard to find everything, but some more comments searchable via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... or https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Indeed, destroying humanity might even adversely affect profits. That can't be good. Perhaps the way to prevent AI-induced human extinction, nanobots, paperclips, and gray goo has been solved: avoid anything that might harm the profit margins and stock price.
In a world where bandwidth was limited, and the packet size minimum was 64 bytes plus an inter-frame gap (it still is for most Ethernet networks), sending a TCP packet for literally every byte wasted a huge amount of bandwidth. The same goes for sending empty acks.

On the other hand, my general position is: it's not TCP_NODELAY, it's TCP.
I think we need to separate licensing and promotion. They have wildly different outcomes. Licensing is cool, it's part of the recipe. Promoting something above its legitimate weight is akin to collusion or buying up amazon reviews without earning them.
Great article!

One nit.

I think statistical randomness seems to be conflated with pseudo-random number generators here. (PRNGs)

The wiki definition of statistical randomness is:
"A numeric sequence is said to be statistically random when it contains no recognizable patterns or regularities"

Does this apply to true random number generators (TRNGs)?

You better hope it does. At least in the long-run or "in the limit".
Otherwise, it is not a TRNG.

A TRNG should generate, in the long-run, "A number sequence containing no recognizable patters or regularities.

So, I think we can say: statistical randomness does not imply PRNGs, but can apply to TRNGs also.

I think the issue comes from the fact there are a large number of statistical randomness TESTs for PRNGs to qualify PRNGs with a qualified form of statistical randomness.

So, I think psuedo-random number generators would have been more appropriate than "statistical randomness" to identify PRNGs.

But, it's really a small nit.

Again, great article!
ChatGPT maker OpenAI explores whether users can 'responsibly' make AI porn
Im red green colorblind. When wearing my enchroma, some things I thought were brown are actually very red.

On the other hand green lights lose their green.

On a day to day basis I can functionally see red and green, but sometimes when a red or a green is next to a brown I cant distinguish them.

And versions of red that regular people might have a hard time distinguishing would be impossible for me to distinguish.
Assuming they train newer models using output from older versions, isn't that data they collected from "books1" and "books2" still encoded in the weights of their current models?

This also begs the question, does OpenAI really honor their privacy controls and not use user information to train their models if the user opts out? It seems most companies are operating in "ask for forgiveness than permission"-mode as they scramble to stay competitive in the AI race. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127106
8+ years ago I accepted an offer to join some family on an impromptu weekend trip. Plenty of pool time was expected so I brought the novel I was 3/4ths the way through, its sequel, and an unrelated book on the off-chance I wanted something different. Combined these books took up half my carry-on satchel (I enjoy long epic fantasy), turning it from a simple carry to a painful shoulder-biter and hip-digger.

I purchased a Kindle after that trip. I read a lot more than I used to because between my phone and the physical Kindle I always have my current book ready to go. Physical book purchases can now be hardcover-only because I'm buying for a permanent collection, not endless consumption.
It's not a right/left thing, at least not in the colloquial sense those words are used in US. Laws like these have broad support on both sides of the political spectrum. The fundamental problem is authoritarianism, which is a disease infesting both left and right.
The "free market" mostly isn't.

LLMs are actively harmful to society and in a way that individuals cannot combat, and spam/fraud is merely the obvious way.
I find this one really disgusting
The original theatrical version has the voiceover. It was added following negative feedback from test screenings.
If only msft was actually promoting it like that. Do they even sell books still?
Sam is just altruistically anti privacy and personal autonomy
> Anyway, it is IMO incorrect to say that the book did not suggest Deckard might be an android, and likewise, the movie only hints that Deckard is a replicant.

Isn't it kind of confirmed in 2049 that he isn't a replicant, though?
Just a matter of time before anyone can buy ad placements like Google Adsense and a walled app garden allows a customer to price match their car insurance when they type in “how do I get cheap car insurance?” into ChatGPT and openAI takes 30%. The future is here! I guess?
The end user that refuses to pay for services they use under some misplaced guise of "anything on the internet I am entitled to for free".
Relevant Oxide and Friends podcast episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqvVmYhclAg
WhatsApp User Interface Update
Diet failure: willpower, miscalculation or metabolic compensation?
For some reason this reminded me of the "500mi email" bug [1], maybe a similar level of initial apparent absurdity?

[1] https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Amazing story by Ang Pemba Sherpa! Only crossed paths briefly a few times at the outdoor store mentioned in the article (Next Adventure!) but I'm a big fan of all of his work and photography [0,1].

[0] http://angpembasherpa.com/

[1] https://www.instagram.com/angpembasherpa
4M Context – Llama-3-8B-Instruct
>They're pretty good at generating summaries of text, simple machine translation, generating alternative prose

They're not, though. For these tasks they are mediocre at best.
Nine New Albums I'm Recommending
"which means I think all ideologies have at least some truth " I doubt it. National Socialism and Communism are clearly counter examples. I'm very curious why haven't you thought about these very important ideologies in European history (both killed millions of Europeans)

"mental model to include more than just two ways of thinking, left vs. right." I do. I guess because you haven't mention which European country you are from and the typical demographic of HN, that you are American. And the American mind can not comprehend European history and links between various conflicts. So most peopöe can not put together into two bins of Politics like in the American election system.
So you see the marketing point of ChatGPT to be conversational ads?
Some network stacks like those in Solaris and HP/UX let you tune the "Nagle limit" in just such a fashion, up to disabling it entirely by setting it to 1. I'm not aware of it being tunable on Linux, though you can manually control the buffering using TCP_CORK. https://baus.net/on-tcp_cork/ has some nice details.
Nasa’s proposed plasma rocket would get us to Mars in 2 months
A lot of stock values are based on expectations of future earnings. Whether or not it was a valid expectation idk
Using XCB is often a much better experience than xlib.
Was a few hours enough time? I mean, who shows up on time, especially with such a long journey time.
I’m skeptical because the limiting factor for a person using flippers is their lungs, and a propeller is less efficient for propulsion.
Oh interesting. Yeah much higher budget than I remembered: Blade Runner $30M. Higher than, around 1982, Raiders of the Lost Ark ($20M), same as The Empire Strikes Back ($30M), higher than Conan the Barbarian ($20M), Higher than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ($12M), similar to Octopussy ($28M), or Ghostbusters. Among the highest budgets of the period really.
Can you point me towards more info on GJB2 therapies? This is the cause of my son's hearing loss.
Apparently it's now a division of Pearson: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/browse/coming-soon
The habits of effective remote teams
Did you read the same reception section as me? It seems to be very well regarded and even when there were some criticism, they were minor. For example,

> Anthropologist Durba Chattaraj said "elisions, slippages, and too-exaggerated leaps" when referring to archaeology from India, but stated that its authors are "extremely rigorous and meticulous scholars",

So yes, there are criticism of the book by experts in the field, but they seem minor compared to the whole picture and impact the book is having.

There is a reason this book is so positively received because Graeber and Wengrow are real scholars.
>we didnt just invent a better plow

But we invented metalworking. And if metal were for kings chairs only, we would still have no plows.
This is not at all a summary, it's a book review and it is based on 4 hand-picked examples.

I wouldn't read anything into it.
Those are the apps are quickly written and do not care if they unnecessarily congest the network. The ones that do get properly maintained can set TCP_NODELAY. Seems like a reasonable default to me.
The physical world has limits, that's why sigmoids everywhere.
Actually, real world socioeconomic data on familial wealth holdings is incredibly hard to come by.
What would cause them to not survive poverty? would they all commit suicide or spontaneously combust?

Avoiding death is a pretty strong force for adaptation to new circumstances.
Using bootc-image-builder (https://github.com/osbuild/bootc-image-builder)
You can convert a bootc image into multiple different formats including vmdk, iso, raw, qcow2 ...
Started just by building Chromium and Brave and poking around in there and making small changes.

Chromium is huge but has terrific documentation (once you find the current copy) and Google hosted code search. Digging through crbug.com often helped point us in the right direction.

2 unlocks that made us confident to pursue this project:

1) Repeatable way of patching Chromium and keeping up with upstream changes
2) Writing UI in web technology instead of C++ Views toolkit.
If I can multiselect my favorite programming authors and adjust their influence on my team's work I'm all in. If they do it for me or because someone pays them too, I'll gippity right off this train.
The models are multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the compressed versions of their training data, they can not be the equivalent of a DB of it.
I have read comments here which indicate that at least some believe Boeing's engineering decline was already underway by the time of the merger. Whether that was reflected in manufacturing, or whether that's even accurate, is beyond my knowledge.

However, it's definitely the case that the accusations exist.
So partnerships are available only to "select, high-quality editorial partners" - is that a polite way of saying "rich"?
I expect chatGPT will be very effective at delivering targeted advertising and shilling products, because truth and accuracy are not required for the job. Writing convincing bullshit about $product is basically a perfect use-case for it. And since it's just a computer program you can't sue it for false advertising, right?
Howdy to Omaha !

I was born & raised to be an entrepreneur so it was no leap to know that I would do it.

>very long days,

etc. has always been known to come with the territory.

I probably only became conscious of it as about a 12-year old, but there is a piece of advice I was well aware of by then.

Of course, I wanted to take initiative but I was too young.

Regardless, there is advice I always heed, and I was cognizant that my actions did not yet reflect my desires.

Anyway, I was doing pretty good in my father's company at the time.

Later, after college it was truly wisest to work toward employment with a multinational outfit, to become established in an industry before going out on my own.

I witnessed all kinds of amazing opportunities pass me by for a number of years, I wanted to take initiative but it didn't bother me because I just couldn't afford to open up shop yet.

Once I did start my company, more opportunities and more difficulties did arise than I had anticipated, but I wouldn't have done it any other way.

Now with 20/20 hindsight the one piece of advice that has always been in view and seems to stand the test of time.

This isn't just how I felt 6 months to a year before I left my employer, this is how I felt for decades before starting my company:

Start Sooner.

That's why I did manage to start it as soon as I could, and it was a tremendous advantage.
> It is more natural because creatures in nature do it. All the behaviours that we have in common with other mammals are natural and eternal. They can never be legislated away

We outlaw all sorts of things that can be found in nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)
I meant registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-bootc
Commercial adoption has only started to ramp up. We are going to see a floodwave of LLM-powered bots/UX-wizards.

Even if academic progress stalls, we're going to be inundated for at least another few years.
Well you usually cannot sell derivative works as your own.
Ugh, "albums" are Genesis, Yes or other dreary AoR; the cool kids listen(ed) to LPs ...
I'd just love a protocol that has a built in mechanism for realizing the other side of the pipe disconnected for any reason.
We do not have anywhere near the quality of data about familial wealth holdings to say anything of the sort
Discussion [0] (20 points, 17 hours ago, 15 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304528
The question that is unanswered, is the logarithmic performance improvement the result of better sampling of the underlying distribution over time, or related to just doing more training with slight variations to effectively regularize the model so it generalizes better? If it's the former, that indicates that we could achieve small models that are every bit as smart as large ones in limited domains, and if that's the case, it radically changes the landscape of what an optimal model architecture is.

I suspect from the success of Phi3 that it is in fact the former.
Into your head.
I would change the text on the homepage "StJou - Made for idiots By idiots" and "Let's see how much money you've lost" might be funny but IMHO not appealing for financial data.

Have you done a https://news.ycombinator.com/show post for the project?
Yeah, they do. Microsoft Press.
I don't believe the "Digital Video Express"[1] (aka DIVX[2]) discs were ever cracked while they were on the market. But that's only because they were only sold for 1 year and nobody bought any. Even now finding information about the disc format is rare. Although anyone who has a reason to try probably should be able to do it easily since it was just 3DES.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX

[2] And this is when I remember that Wikipedia links are case-sensitive
I once worked for a company solving mutual suspicion for cloud computing — in the 1980s.

In STEM the trick is to realise your elders are mistaken at the right moment, not too late, but also not too soon. One must have a coup d'oeil for the à-propos.

Lagniappe: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/KCR9FD/friedrich-wilhelm-von-seydl...
> Where is the line between "gene therapy" to eliminate differences (such as deafness) and eugenics?

The difference is usually a matter of informed consent. Eugenics tends to be non-consensual. Sterilization or forced birth control for unwanted individuals. Murder of unwanted individuals. Involuntary genetic modification of unwanted individuals will probably pop up eventually.

Typically gene therapies are on living, consenting people with all the information to make a choice. It also doesn't usually result in germline modification. The sticky part is when you get to babies and fetuses. Can a mother consent for her fetus? What about germline modification? In-vitro gene therapy? Then you are getting into Brave New World territory.
You will eventually succumb to peer pressure. Just like it's hard to participate in society without using a smartphone nowadays, in the future I bet you will for example have trouble doing any job, let alone get one, without using these AI assistants.

And given that society has decided that only the big entities get to win, the only viable AI assistants to use will eventually be the ones from big tech corpos like google and microsoft... in the same way you can't use a smartphone unless you enslave yourself to google or apple.

I really wish society in general figured out how bad it is to bet everything on big corporations, but alas here we are, ever encroaching on the cyberpunk dystopia we've fictionalized many decades ago :(
The article doesn't claim that CSV is superior, though. It only mentions CSV once, as a workaround for the problem that relational databases mostly don't support importing from Parquet directly.

It does rather feel like at least that part of the rant would be better addressed by adding such support, though. If Parquet is already a de facto standard in the industry, I'm sure there already are Postgres extensions that add such support; how hard would it be to convince the maintainers to take the best-written one and use it to add support directly to core Postgres, just as it already has for CSV and JSON?
> Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and “richer brand expression” in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments. Finally, through PPP, OpenAI also offers licensed financial terms to publishers.

> A recent model from The Atlantic found that if a search engine like Google were to integrate AI into search, it would answer a user’s query 75% of the time without requiring a clickthrough to its website.

If the user searching for the information finds what they want in ChatGPT's response (now that they have direct access to the publisher data), why would they visit the publisher website ? I expect the quality of responses to degrade to the point where GPT behaves more like a search engine than a transformer, so that the publishers also get the clicks they want.
(unrelated but if you do want to buy a book on C#, get Pro .NET Memory Management, Konrad Kokosa is really good, also works as a systems programming primer on memory in general, do not get the books from microsoft press)
> I'm a huge proponent of stronger regulation and government involvement in corporate day-to-day.

I agree, however we aren’t seeing this in any meaningful fashion, let alone the amount we need to be seeing it to stave off catastrophe. So given this context, I am all for citizen/employee protest in whatever way required to get things to change course.

> It's likely that we would agree on quite a bit. Where we disagree is on the solution to the problems society faces.

I agree with this. Sorry if my last post was a bit aggressive.

> The solution is not forcing the global economy to grind to a halt by abruptly forcing oil companies to stop extracting oil.

I agree with this, but the longer we kick the can down the road, the more urgent the situation becomes and the more drastic the medicine we’ll need to take. So while right now we can possibly get by with a phase out so long as we start getting much more aggressive on renewables, in 20 years we’ll likely be in a “we have to turn off the oil taps immediately” situation. Would’ve been nice if Exxon hadn’t hidden their climate change data in the 60s and given everyone a chance for a peaceful transition. But they didn’t, and so I support everyone refusing to work on energy projects.
You've got to distinguish syntax from semantics, though. I agree, it's easy to turn a big semantic win into a net readability loss if you choose to represent it with an overly terse syntax that promotes code golf.
its so interesting that in Likert scale surveys, I tend to see huge positivity bias/agreement bias, but comments tend to be critical/negative. I think there is something related to the format of feedback that skews the graph in general.

On HN, my theory is that positivity is the upvotes, and negativity/criticality is the discussion.

Personally, my contribution to your effort is that I would love to see a tool that could do this analysis for me over a dataset/corpus of my choosing. The code is nice, but it is a bit beyond me to follow in your footsteps.
Because HN has rules about comments and reaction baiting that I'm not going to break

They are easy to find with a search engine if you want to learn
This reeks of the "manic charlie smoking a cig in front of a pinboard" meme
I want more research into how a flock of birds can manage to sync up and poop on my car at the same time.
It's worse than that:

> Me: Give me a small sample code in Ruby that takes two parameters and returns the Levenshtein distance between them.

> ChatGPT: <<Submits working Ruby code that is slow>> But here is some C# code that is faster. For tasks like this a lot of programmers are using C#, you wouldn't want to get left behind.
I wonder if both Taiwan and the US would rather destroy TSMC than let if fall into CCP's hands.
I think goes further than cannabis research. People hear what they want to hear to support their side.

The few Huberman podcasts I have listened too I find he hasn't really taken a stand on anything and typically reads from a paper that claims things. Just reading the results of a study, or saying something is interesting and should be explored more is now an endorsement by him for some reason.
Who is stopping them?
How to Normalize Phone Numbers
I am not sure if you meant 'wipe' or 'whip', but under the assumption of the former, I do not recommend Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the canonical wiping of the ass. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is where the game is, and always was, to the chagrin of many a copyright troll. I speak directly from experience.
Ah so this is that oft-touted "progress" I hear AI sycophants talk about breathlessly, ways for companies to shove more ads down our throats!
Yeah, to be clear I was specifically referring to videos of people reacting to the glasses that supposedly let colorblind people see color. I think EnChroma is the big name in that space. I didn't specify "color correcting", because that was the only kind of glasses mentioned in the GP comment.

Normal glasses that correct refractive vision issues are obviously real, and great, I'm certainly a big fan of mine. And while I've never seen it in person, videos of babies seeing through refractive correction glasses are adorable every time.
You want the people at these companies to get a 3 dollar tip each time they restore someone's hearing?
Yup. The big pretense we pull as an industry is to pretend all of the data for all these models are somehow legitimate. It's all illegal. But what are you gonna do about it?