skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Atomic weapons emerged slightly before the first craft to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, but we’re still nowhere near interstellar travel. On the other hand, the difficulty of space travel is largely a function of the escape velocity, which is dependent on the gravitational pull of your planet and solar system (both of which are variable).

One issue with your claim though is that once you have interstellar flight, you certainly have weapons of mass destruction. Even crashing a coke-can sized meteor into the Earth at 1% of the speed of light would cause major destruction.
Going to reply to myself since I searched for it on a whim..
https://www.sumita-opt.co.jp/en/products/lumilass.html
No one ever got fired for implementing soft delete.
why does Chinese or Japanese have symbols? Why does mathematics have symbols? Symbols represent concepts. Once you know what a symbol means you can grok a lot from it. They are limited by using keyboard characters, if the authors had their way, they would have a custom keyboard with custom symbols, but then most people will not be able to use it with any computer, so they stuck to such characters. The idea is notation as a tool of thought. You don't have to think of chunks of words to think of reversing a list. Yet, that's how we often think when we program, we read keywords or list expressions or loops and run the code in our head which slows comprehension.

https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...
or
https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
Beyond high-powered wearables, Amprius' battery tech has drawn interest from the electric aviation, satellite and drone industries ..the company does mention the EV sector as a future market, estimating an EPA range boost from 310 miles (500 km) to 547 miles (880 km) from applying its silicon-anode cells to a Tesla Model 3 battery pack.

Sounds like rechargeable battery tech.
The JPEG algorithm is:

1. Divide up the image into 8x8 patches

2. Take the DCT (a variant of the Fourier transform) of each patch to extract key features

3. Quantize the outputs

4. Use arithmetic encoding to compress

The ViT algorithm is:

1. Divide up the image into 16x16 patches

2. Use query/key/value attention matrices to extract key features

3. Minimize cross-entropy loss between predicted and actual next tokens. (This is equivalent to trying to minimize encoding length.)

ViT don't have quantization baked into the algorithm, but NNs are being moved towards quantization in general. Another user correctly pointed out that vision transformers are not necessarily autoregressive (i.e. they may use future patches to calculate values for previous patches), while arithmetic encoding usually is (so JPEG is), so the algorithms have a few differences but nothing major.

-----

I think it's pretty interesting how closely related generation and compression are. ClosedAI's Sora[^1] model uses a denoising vision transformer for their state-of-the-art video generator, while JPEG has been leading image compression for the past several decades.

[^1]: https://openai.com/index/sora/?video=big-sur
I've been using Destucture [1] for a few years. It's an interesting compromise that works for atom and string keys because it's explicit, kind of like the sigil approach. Though this seems way more streamlined, especially as someone who uses JS for front-end apps.

[1]https://github.com/danielberkompas/destructure/
There are a lot of models that are simply good at that without hallucinating nonsense. LLMs are a specific thing with their own tradeoffs and goals. If you have a ML model that says how much does this microscope photo look like an anomaly in this persons blood on a scale from 0-100 it can certainly do better than a human.
Hmm - fair enough. By this (valid!) argument, _any_ statement about the world is misinformative, because there's always an implicit caveat of "...if my perceptions of the world are accurate reflections of its state, and if I'm correct in believing that other people (who report their perceptions of the world to me) are in fact other people and not just hallucinations".

I personally think it's fair to take that assumption as baseline in any discussion not specifically about epistemology, since, without it, any discussion will founder (and, _if_ that assumption is taken as an axiom, I still maintain that it's not misinformation to make the ~~true~~ overwhelmingly-supported-by-my-perceptions-and-my-perceptions-of-other-people's-perceptions statement that "human history is vanishingly-short on a universal scale") - but you are certainly technically correct.
TL;DR.

Cutting corners sometimes makes sense -- that's why timeboxing is important. But always?
This isn't a serious comparison.

One project versus thousands in all fifty states?
> insanely high energy requirements

That is just for small personal cars, not even SUV or trucks. And requires a few megawatts... Very good argument to cancel this whole insanity.

> coal and oil extraction

EV charging stations are still using oil and coal. Some are even build with diesel generators, as a "backup" (like at night).
Your setup is flawed.
No idea of this is even vaguely in the right direction, but this comes to mind: Unsupervised speech-to-speech translation from monolingual data

https://research.google/blog/unsupervised-speech-to-speech-t...
I've heard that "da kine" in Hawai'i Creole English historically was, and still may be, used exactly in situations where the speakers share plenty of context, allowing them to figure out what it denotes, but leaving listeners largely unenlightened.

compare "dude" in Fig. 1 of https://acephalous.typepad.com/79.3kiesling.pdf
An acquaintance more or less seriously told me he's considering working into his 70s or 80s, I wonder how many other people are considering that option. It looks pretty bleak.
As an individual, you are responsible for yourself, and preparing for every improbable event would not be a good time / life enjoyment trade off.

As a society, we are responsible for not only our society, but we also set the stage for the entire future of the human race. Though an improbable event probably won’t happen tomorrow, we can say with a certain amount of assurance that it will happen in the future.

Therefore we can and should prepare for these events.
> But in general, a frontier LLMs like the ones trained by Open AI would not make such silly mistakes in their output.

This is beginning to wear a bit thin. Every public application of AI produces obvious nonsense, and this doesn’t appear to be changing. The inevitable defence is “oh, they used GPT3.5 instead of GPT4/oh, they used GPT4, but not the version that was only publicly available for three weeks in 2023/oh, they used precisely the right GPT4 but, when sacrificing the goat while petitioning Roko’s Basilisk for useful output, they used the wrong sort of knife”.

Apparently, literally no-one can use these things properly, at least for publicly visible applications. Either that, or they’re just a bit shit.
>> how's this going to beat texting each other on the phones you already have in your pockets?

It would be nice to be able to look at each other and talk with glances down to the badge.

Having a conversation with a deaf person via a phone really takes you out of the experience of being in a one to one conversation.

I'm thinking a little light that blinks when I am talking would give a visual cue to the deaf conversation member that I am speaking and draw their attention to the badge.
Solar Storms are disrupting farmer GPS systems during critical planting time
While scrolling through Instagram, I came across a post discussing the practice of saving bacon fat for later use. Although I already do this myself, I was wondering about the benefits or uses of doing so.

However, the top two comments on the post were rather negative and provocative. One commenter dismissed the idea as unoriginal, stating that another community had already been doing it. The other commenter expressed dislike for the taste of bacon-infused broccoli. This led to a lengthy exchange of comments between various users.

I sometimes find myself inclined to getting enraged without considering them from an outside perspective. However, seeing from a third person's POV served as a good reminder to do so.
7 in 50 states.
How this argument reads to someone concerned about the trajectory of AI and the governance systems around it (current or future): There are various technical problems preventing these systems from being as scary as you imagine, but don't worry because we're working hard to solve them!

Also "agency" isn't a requirement for almost any AI doom scenario I've heard of. Goals and the formation of instrumental goals is all it takes.
That’s great news. This wasn’t just a possible loophole but a certain one. There were numerous actual proposals from all major carriers for fast lanes that prioritized certain apps. This reminds me to also renew my donation to the EFF.
I find it delusional to think we're close in any way to being multiplanetary. Mars hardly has an atmosphere and you can't survive outside a pressurized environment. You could build a base there but not a city, not even considering the amount of people need to have a self sufficient community and the amount of resources needed to transport what's needed to jumpstart it.
Makes sense. If you are offering a 'fast lane' then you are just slowing down everyone who doesn't pay.
We have a rather lousy history of completely avoiding risks that we predicted.

Environmental issues consistently get addressed after people start noticing harms, but AI may not give civilizations time to react after they fuck up.
If you take the results of this work and also recent work in understanding what’s called the “Null space” of preparatory neuronal activity prior to action [1] then it paints a fairly clear picture that the null space might be interacting with this micro tubular architecture, and perhaps the activation function for skeletal muscle act is this wave collapse, informing the null space function evaluation

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-024-00796-z.epdf?shar...
There have been plenty of moments in history where if a country doesn't resort to conscription then it won't continue to exist. If a country exists in a rough neighborhood, then its people must, unfortunately, expect to be enslaved for a few years of their life. In some ways, humanity has made little progress in the last hundred years. It's a shame that some large countries continue to have leaders that are so determined to expand the size of their country no matter the cost. It's also a shame that so many countries continue to trade with such tyrants.
Another submission[1] on hn’s front page talks about whale songs being more structured than we thought.

If we cannot understand or even perceive information in messages from a species from the same planet, then I’d guess we’re incapable of finding (noticing) non earth signals.

Sure, an interstellar message could be tuned for easy recognition, but there are plenty of regular patterns in the observable universe already.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40322267
No; that's the number that've completed the entire process. More are in active planning, construction, etc.

In December it was 0 with the same $7.5B investment; https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger...
The typical protective device blocks the induced current from entering the transformer. "neutral-current-blocking capacitors".

Apparently more cautious operators have been busy installing them since at least 1989.

https://assets.lloyds.com/assets/pdf-solar-storm-risk-to-the...
If these are state actors, then the US state needs to grow a backbone and treat these as an actual act of war. China, Russia, and the like need to face serious consequences or they will only go further.
This. Llms aren’t very good and are just predictive text. And I say that as someone who has a lot of experience using them.
We don’t have anything to fear from AI for quite some time.

As an aside, the AI generated search snippets in google are messing me up. They seem good for random things I don’t know about but are awful for programming things where I’m looking for a specific solution to a specific problem. They always just give me the “right” way no matter how much it doesn’t really work like that.

An example would be trying to figure out how to solve a weird edge case or error, something that stack overflow is amazing at and it just feeds me generic instructions - which honestly fooled me for a while before I learned to ignore.
>nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools //

How would you know? Seems pretty likely based on how companies try to enshitify the web.
Romantism as a service
> For coding it's easy, the code works or it doesn't.

Oh, wow. That’s a quote that could be written on a lot of figurative gravestones. Also some literal ones; see THERAC-25.
Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately `git fetch` is necessary to fetch any recent commits
Could someone point to where in the article that is? Figure 5 is not a counterexample in my opinion, for the reasons mentioned in an one of my other comments, namely a single deviation from a spiralling line (if there are such lines) is not proof that all other lines are not spiralling. It is only a counterexample with regards to those particular lines.
The GPS data is needed to log the planting, modern farmers use a lot of statistics and data analysis to increase yield. In the case of planting, the position of planting is stored so the machinery wont run it over or double plant. Later seed quantity and distribution is analyzed against yield when harvesting to hone down on the best parameters for the crop and field.
>If you live in a community, that means sometimes the community makes decisions for you.

Your logic is the nonsense logic used by every evil man to justify whatever atrocity they feel necessary, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century alone. If every human being in the world stood up and said no to taxation and no to conscription, there wouldn't have been any world wars or genocides.

It's not the "community" that decides to war, in almost all cases politicians who have a vested financial interest in war and nothing to lose, sending common people to die who have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Not when the intervention is done on someone already about to die.
The Fermi Paradox implies that some percentage of advanced civilizations would desire to physically explore many star systems.

This assumes that advancements in physics don't make that activity less interesting to the aliens.
Europe must boost productivity, not hours worked
There is an opinion piece in the same issue that agrees with you.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp0670

> This machine costs a fraction of current clinical scanners, is safer, and needs no costly infrastructure to run (2). Although low-field machines are not capable of yielding images that are as detailed as those from high-field clinical machines, the relatively low manufacturing and operational costs offer a potential revolution in MRI technology as a point-of-care screening tool.

I don't think this machine is being billed as replacement to high-field machines.
Haha, Yes SaaS is so outdated ;)
Your still talking about a ~5x price change resulting in a ~2x change in usage, that’s seriously inelastic demand.
There’s an excellent 2hr or so podcast episode on free will that has drastically changed my mind on the notion of determinism. The main argument is that the notion of “choice” is in fact an illusion and when you dive into what you’re actually doing when you “choose” you realize that it’s really just determinism under the hood.

In other words a deterministic universe is actually completely consistent with our experience once you realize that the mechanism of us “choosing” anything is really an illusion.

Highly recommend it.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-with-sam-...
Ok. I'll bite. And ask this: What does Tesla know that everyone else doesn't? Their charging stations are decently common in high population density areas. I presume their ability to GTD wouldn't change if they ventured into less dense areas. So what do they know?
Are humans able to destroy all this habitat because they've got a better brain architecture, because they are able to achieve higher brain mass (because they don't need to fly to survive), or because they have opposable thumbs?

There's too many confounding factors to say that the human brain architecture is actually 'better' based on the outcomes of natural selection. And if we kill all the birds, we will lose the chance to find out as we develop techniques to better compare the trade-offs of the different architectures.
I'm planning to be a bodybuilder. I've had many expensive lunches on the topic with the best consultants. So that's basically the same thing as getting ripped, even though in real life I can at best bench 50 pounds. The platonic ideal in our minds is all that matters in our unserious world.
There is a lot of intelligence in plants. For example crown shyness, navigating to water, trees informing each other that a giraffe is eating their leaves, etc.
I like the last paragraph. Will remember that when an engineer slows down a project talking about code smells and revisiting architecture decisions.

> Professional software developers are performing a service for others. That’s the difference between a professional and a hobbyist or an artist.
Do you think your time is worth giving your 100% dedication to this “high performing” team? It appears that they care much less about you and more about code golfing olympics.

Remember, you cannot get those decades back or the time that you're spending and if you are unhappy then it is time to do something about it before it goes wrong.
This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics, so they're probably related."

It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.
Tesla has been doing it for over a decade.
Oh nice, I didn't know about that one! It's interesting how many solutions are in this space; aside from Destructure[0] and shorter_maps[1] I also know about shorthand[2] and synex[3].

[0] https://github.com/danielberkompas/destructure
[1] https://github.com/meyercm/shorter_maps
[2] https://hex.pm/packages/shorthand
[3] https://hex.pm/packages/synex
Are you being extra compensated for being on the extra demanding team? In many contexts the type of constant demand for high performance is also called a death march or at least a crunch.

It is poor management in my opinion and when a team constantly gives 110% every sprint then there is nothing left to give when you encounter a true crisis.

Remember, it almost assuredly the case that your employer does not give a rat's ass about you and will fire you with crocodile tears in their eyes proudly telling the world that they regret having to make the hard choices leading to their retention bonus and your dismissal.

As an example, Musk just fired the entire charging team to prove a point to other team leads.
Was testing it and trying to create an account and got a random error because was not accepting the terms. The error should say “please accept the terms”instead.
We could turn it around: How do you -know- that freedom of speech is some kind of absolute good? It seems this, like any proposition, should not be simply taken as axiomatic. Maybe reasonable people can disagree.

Support for freedom of speech is indeed decreasing with each generation[1] and it is a pretty clear trend. Specifically, and from an older survey, 40% of Millennials are OK with limiting free speech that is offensive to minorities[2]. The age cohort trend is pretty clear here, too. While we may not agree, the next generations will shape things to come (assuming democracy survives).

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/30/more-so-t...

2: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/40-of-mil...
I guess it depends what you're reading, but the point remains that there's likely gender based pay gap within any given field/position.

I'm not sure where the "anyway" comes from in your last statement. The reasons for the disparity don't affect the reality that it's there.
But what about data overwrites? This is basically the same as deleting data, since information will be destroyed. Using soft delete is a somewhat naive solution if there is no mechanism for restoring overwritten data.
But “goals” is doing an insane amount of heavy lifting here.

In order to have goals you need to have a model of the world.
LLMs do not have a model of the world.

Your goal then is changing this world somehow so you need actuators.

So you need a model and actuators.

All we have is a stream of words appended in a probabilistic manner.
If I'm a real estate developer, and I invest $100M on 300 homes in a new subdivision, at some point I'm probably gonna be $90M in with very few completed homes to show for it.
But you disprove yourself in the same observation, no? we can detect language pretty reliably without being able to decode it
I think the argument is that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs regardless of their age.
I can just see it, “Did you buy me these flowers I was it that stupid app?”
https://sourcegraph.com/cody
No, we only happened to detect a language; still, we thought it’s simpler than it actually is, even though we are on the same planet and carbon based, with similar life spans, sizes, etc.

I wouldn’t say we can reliably detect languages, I’m sure there are many more communications between earth species that we’re still not seeing, not noticing or otherwise misclassifying.
I would suggest to drop "Amateur" from the title in the sense that languages are useful both professionally and privately - you never know in what language your next deal will be signed, your next networking acqaintance bumps into you to make you the next job offer etc.

Besides, as a professional (computational) linguist, I have met many trained/professional linguists that know only one language - typically English - well - I think that is professionally totally unacceptable when your mission is to study language (in abstract, intentionally without article here => linguistics); the way a language structures the world for you in the way its vocab influences the way you think in concepts (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, AKA linguistic relativity => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity ) is something that you should at least occasionally step out of, so that you don't take it for granted, and for that, you need to master a second language.
That's why nuclear is interesting there. Unless you're asking Europe to just accept being phased out of industrial economy without doing anything to avoid that…
I'm in my 50s, and did the startup thing in my 20s during the original dotcom boom. It didn't matter. Your life will go on no matter what you do or do not do by 30. You'll spend the future decades learning and growing and adapting to a
changing world, just like the rest of us. The only people whose lives peak by 30 are the ones who stopped growing at 30. Don't do that. Keep living, learning and growing. Do it forever, and there are no deadlines... just ongoing life.
This is contrary to the goal of equality.