skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
During Bell Labs’ heyday, it was the beneficiary of AT&T’s nationwide monopoly. AT&T was a monopoly subject to various restrictions by the US government as part of a series of legal cases. When a lab is part of a monopoly, whether it’s due to being a natural monopoly (like AT&T) or due to patent rights (Xerox in its heyday), it could lavishly fund labs that give its researchers large amounts of freedom. Such resources and freedom resulted in many groundbreaking discoveries and inventions.

However, AT&T was broken up in 1984 as the result of yet another lawsuit involving AT&T’s monopoly. Bell Labs still remained, but it no longer had the same amount of resources. Thus, the lab’s unfettered research culture gradually gave way to shorter-term research that showed promise of more immediate business impact. A similar thing happened to Xerox PARC when the federal government forced Xerox to license its xerography patents in the mid-1970s; this, combined with the end of a five-year agreement where Xerox’s executives promised not to meddle in the operations of Xerox PARC, led to increased pressure on the researchers (though, ironically, Xerox infamously didn’t take full advantage of the research PARC produced, though that’s another story).

Combine this with a business culture that emerged in the 1990s that disdains long-term, unfettered research and emphasizes short-term research with promises of immediate business impact, and this has resulted in the transformation of industrial research. There are some labs like Microsoft Research that still provide their researchers a great deal of freedom, but such labs are rare these days. It’s amazing that well-resourced companies like Apple don’t have labs like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, but if businesses are beholden to quarterly results, why would they invest in long-term, risky research projects?

This leaves government and academia. Unfortunately government, too, is often subject to ROI demands from politicians (which is nothing new; check out how the Mansfield Amendment changed ARPA into DARPA), and academia is subject to “publish or perish” demands.

The running theme is that unfettered research with a proper amount of resources can result in world-changing discoveries and inventions. However, funding such research requires a large amount of resources as well as patience, since research takes time and results don’t always come in neat quarterly or even annual periods. Our business culture lacks this type of patience, and many businesses lack the resources to devote to maintaining labs at the level of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. Even academia and government lacks this type of patience.

The question is how can we encourage unfettered research in a world that is unwilling to fund it. I’ve been thinking of ideas for quite some time, but I haven’t fully fleshed them out yet.
The phone is worth less to the thief, so theft becomes less lucrative and there is less incentive for the thief to steal your phone.
Accessibility benefits everyone, but in the basics you’re right. Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility. At least on the Apple side.

And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
More on Evolved Values
Well said. The author's argument is equivalent to saying advanced medical technology (or any advanced technology) is dystopian because it's in a bunch of scifi movies that happened to be dystopian.
> big percentage of production went to keeping OEMs happy to avoid screwing customers that had designed in RPi products.

To avoid screwing /a selected subset/ of customers that had designed in RPi products.
I think you're reading it backwards. If you look closely at how medicine is done today, you will see that there are many areas where it is wildly divorced from reality. So, the point was not "we'll be vastly better soon", it's more "we're in a bad place now".

The current most wildly successful, heavily prescribed medicines today are statins. They help 1 in 104 people in terms of preventing heart attacks, 1 in 154 people in terms of preventing stroke. (Those are people without known heart disease, but they are the vast majority of people taking statins.) They harm 1 in 10 by causing muscle damage, 1 in 50 by causing diabetes. [1] That's the success story. (Sure, you can debate the details. Do they really cause diabetes? Unclear. Do they help anyone, ever, to not die sooner? Unclear.)

It seems like the main reason they're considered so successful is that they do indeed lower an intermediate metric, namely blood cholesterol level. I am sure that bloodletting was successful at removing blood, and if you have an infection, you could even say at removing bad blood.

And yes, I'm cherrypicking my definition of success. Modern medicine can indeed dramatically improve outcomes for a large set of problems (eg cancer). But doctors were successfully setting bones back in the bloodletting days, too.

[1] https://thennt.com/nnt/statins-for-heart-disease-prevention-...
It's behind you making of a computer game (rtype)
They don't necessarily double every day. Some tumors are very stable, some are particularly metastatic. It often depends on access to blood supply and what type of cell has become cancerous.
That might be a factor too but I was referring more to the nudity and objectification issue.
Not to minimize the experience, but don't the crew regularly "get trapped" on the boat weeks at a time without cellphone data? As in every time they do an ocean crossing.

I was reading an article here recently about the boats that fix the cables on the sea floor, they detailed that very situation and talked about how some ships are opting to add starlink but it's still very ship dependent.
I’m talking more about potential “Her”-like AI partners (the movie). Ones that would be a much more compelling replacement for actual human relationships.

We might want to be a little cautious about blindly going down that path. The tech isn’t there yet, and probably won’t be there next year, but it feels far more possible than ever before.
There’s a huge difference between rationally evaluating risk and how we feel about risk. Just because I rationally understand and choose a certain set of risks, doesn’t mean I can necessarily make myself feel good or even okay about them. Even a small or inconsequential amount of risk can be really scary if the potential bad outcome is really bad.
A cleaver isn't going to try to kill you without someone holding it....
Here's what gets me about this: Mark Zuckerberg bought like 1500 acres of land in Hawaii and is apparently building an underground apocalypse bunker on it. He's doing so, presumably, because he's worried about society collapsing. He's doing it with money that he's made from Facebook, which is the _reason_ society is collapsing.

Mark Zuckerberg has worked his ass off for like 20 years to go live in an underground bunker. Granted, it's a large and luxurious underground bunker, but this does not seem like an improvement.

Mark Zuckerberg controls the largest mass-persuasion device on earth - literally controls, he's got more than 50% of the shareholder votes - and is using the proceeds from owning the globe-spanning apocalypse machine that he's turned Facebook into to build himself a bunker underground to survive the apocalypse his machine is creating.

Just turn off the goddamn machine and you can actually enjoy Hawaii, Mark. All the good stuff is above ground!
I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery disappeared with the Roman empire.
Image models are much smaller than language models, so they put some extra language features on an image model here and then it doesn't need to be that large.
I hate paywalls!
I gues we can thank Putin for making Western governments finally realise that maintaining their own manufacturing capacity is vitally important. It only took thirty years, for something that was obvious in 1990.
> seems like computing was so much more expensive compared to now.

Heh. That's an understatement.

My Mac was $1800 (college discount), the 512K upgrade was $400, the extra drive was $400, and $499 for Aztec C.

That's ~$9000 in todays dollars.

I spent almost $5K (today) for my Atari 800 system (essentially obsolete by the time I got my Mac, < 5 years, gave it away to a friend).

I remember being excited when I got my first 1GB drive, since it was only $1/MB. (We already had $1/MB drives, but not that big -- and not SCSI).

I later sold that Mac and put the money towards a motorcycle. Boy, that was one of the best trades I ever did. I had that bike for 26 years. I can't say either was an investment, but that bike aged a lot better than the Mac did!

Anyway, yea, computing was expensive.
Because workers arent slaves or robots, and being on the job doesnt make them such. Your mentality is actually staggering to me.
Hyper-optimizing the Zig Parser [video]
The idea is that with features like this widespread, the probability of a theft leading to the thief repurposing the stolen device will be lower. Therefore, the incentives for thieves – the ones acting rationally within the paradigm of being a thief, at least – will be lower. Therefore, the number of thefts, generally, may go down. A few big ifs here, of course.
AFAIK the plane itself is still technically US soil.
You can, however, build machines using genes. Eg I met someone who was working on research to come up with sets of genes that implemented low level programming primitives, like "if". When some chemical concentration reaches a certain level, a gene is turned on or off. This is fundamental to how cells work, they're just trying to repurpose the machinery that's already there (if you'll forgive the metaphor).

The research I've heard of that I was thinking about here was about splicing genes in such a way that in order to remove it, you will also need to remove genes necessary for reproduction.

I'm not a geneticist and it's been a long time since I've read about this type of thing, so if I'm mistaken or if you know more, I'm all ears.
> You're correct in saying […] a real thing.

This is, indeed, how science works. "All models are wrong", as they say. I'm not sure what you're trying to push back against.
The point is that, by proving the unsafe parts of the standard library correct and Rust's safety guarantees correct, we transitively prove the memory safety (as well as data race freedom, etc.) of all safe Rust code (that uses only the standard library). Only proving the unsafe code correct is far less effort than proving all Rust code correct would be. This addresses the common criticism of "what about unsafe code?" when people talk about Rust's safety guarantees. We can use a more powerful system, like Coq, to fill in the gaps that the Rust type system itself isn't powerful enough to handle.
I think not, actually. There would still be cases where a race is not detected. I can think of the following sequence: A checks - no lock, B checks - no lock, A writes - success, A reads - match, success, B writes - success, B reads - match, success. A and B both think they now hold the lock.

For locking to work properly you'd need to have a conditional write that would fail if some prerequisite was not met. GCP offers that operation, S3 AFAIK does not.
I haven't myself, but I'm interested to see what folks are thinking. Any resources you can share?
Stability in a chaotic system is precarious. Changes, even if small or seemingly trivial, can cause massive cascading effects from positive/negative feedback loops.

Sigh, I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but if that’s gibberish then you might want to strengthen some of the foundational understandings around systems.
I can and do run phi-2/3 on cpu, which are in the same size class.
My son's just completed an essay on Marxist themes in Blake.

I think this guy's ideas of what literary analysis is and is not are pretty idiosyncratic, to be honest.
Everybody knows slavery ended with the Roman Empire.
Equvalent to saying Alcohol is toxic amongst a sample of people that died due to drunk driving.

It appears thar heat stroke caused the problems not "toxic MDMA concentrations". The LD50 of MDMA is estimated to be 180mg/kg - Were those ravers taking tens of capsules? I presume there are toxicology reports from the deaths that estimated the dosages. But alcohol is poisonous if you have too much - we don't usually call it "toxic".

Weirdly they mention "a warm ambient environment" but what were the humidity levels? I presume there is good information on the underlying causes of death elsewhere? That summary is terribly uninformative.

"mortality from classic heat stroke approaches 80% and, for exertional heatstroke, 33% in the absence of prompt treatment" : https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp2210623

Disclaimer: personally I'm not a MDMA user. I'm a concerned citizen that thinks raves are generally healthier than bars. "sensible" MDMA usage anecdotally within those events seems safe to me (sample of thousands of people, zero deaths). Number of people I know dead from MDMA: zero. Number of people I personally know dead from alcohol: many (I am a middle aged guy so some were long term effects, one was in a house fire).
Thanks for picking this up, I thought about trying it out and am very glad that you did go through it.

I don’t think I would touch it anymore.
Never seen anything like this IRL despite working at various major companies. Hell the other day I explained to my rather senior boss that the yellow teams icon means away from desk.

Work is me trading my time for money, and I can begrudgingly accept some level of monitoring. That's after all what a boss is - they supervise aka monitor.

However the blurrying of boundaries really irks me. This is part of the reason why I carry two phones, refuse to use remote desktops from personal devices and definitely don't connect personal devices to corporate wifi. Similarly that aggressive invasive student exam monitoring software in use makes me thankful I studied in more classic times.
I love Japan, I really do but they speak almost 0 English and their language is really hard to get good at.

Also taxes in Japan seem to be quite high, on par with the Netherlands.

Baltic states look interesting! According to google Estonia has a fixed 20% income tax.

Although I'm not sure how to pick between them, all three look kind of similar. I've also surprisingly never heard about someone migrating there for financial purposes. I've always thought of the US as the only place to make a lot of money.
Isn't 25 y not z?
This will happen. These features are always ushered in as ways to make someone's life easier, and often that is exactly what it does, for a time, before some product manager figures out how they can maximize profit with it.

Growth at all costs, I guess.
Will bacterias evolve themselves to become xylitol-resistant? That's the same reason I'm hesitant to use xylitol or the like to treat stuffy nose.
>Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people?

From the average person yes. From ordinary people in general (even not including academics and such), not necessarily, and not as an aggregate group.

Journalists follow rote narratives about faraway countries - either those of the establishment, or of their peer circle.

Or they are too superficial. Or their understanding of the foreign country is the pals they spoke too that tell them what they wanted to hear (or belong to their political persuassion/peer group/class in the first place, and are hardly representative of the country, as in "I spoke to my fellow Ivy League school educated Nigerians about the situation in the country, and they confirmed what I believed was the case").

Most of them are also notoriously ignorant about foreign relations, the history of different countries, and so on, even at the basic level (but still write nonetheless).

The journalists that specialize on a country, and have deep knowledge of it beyond the surface level and beyond their local same-ideology opinions, are few and far between.

The layman Indian immigrant for example would more often than not know more about India and what's going on, than the average journalist writing about some latest development there (or merely rewriting a Reuters or AP report).
> Copyright for me but not for thee.

Especially amusing because, although you can argue about whether training a model is an infringment, most of the training data actually have copyrights.

ML models, on the other hand, are not works of authorship and have no copyright protection at all, period. Or at least that's the natural interpretation of copyright law as it's been applied everywhere up to this point. I suspect that the large commercial interests involved will manage to buy either favorable (but bogus) court decisions or favorable (but stupid) legislation.
It is not a disclaimer. It is a prohibition and yes this distribution to US is a breach. But that's normal for LSE. Barmy.
All these processes happen on your browser(device). The extension uses the Gmail API locally on your browser to perform all the necessary tasks. Your emails never get sent to any external server.

I hope that answers your question.

Edit: Just to add more context. The Google Oauth verification team requires that statement in the privacy policy.
Serfs were by and large slaves. The only major difference was that they were tied to a specific piece of land and couldn’t be sold off separately. Other than that, feudal lords could do with them as they wished.

Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome, especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so your thesis doesn’t make much sense.
Non profits aren't generally charities.
A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations.

<https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...>

That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further.

The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans.

James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video:

<https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0>

More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place.

Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from Plagues Upon the Earth: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.
Does it matter any more?

Do developers care any more what Google announces?

Isn't all the trust gone?
(I work at Roboflow)

We're actively working on this!

Our ML team has noted that the segmentation masks in particular from PaLiGemma are a bit tedious and unintuitive to decode. We should be pushing out (more!) open source software that uses this model in the coming days.

Look forward to an easy way to fine-tune PaLiGemma and broader support for its task types in `inference`, the package used in the blog post.
> it is still derivative work

I don't think that's right, I think it's essentially considered the same work under copyright law. Apparently compilation doesn't fulfil the criteria of derivative works.

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6435/
IMO there's a huge difference between "we do this because we had too many fraudulent applicants and this is a compromise compared to having you interview in-person" versus "this is representative of how the entire employment relationship will go."

If the former, their fears are not unfounded: Sometimes the person who impressed you in the interview is not actually the same person who arrives for their first day of work. There are also less-audacious forms of interview cheating, where an off-screen cyber-Cyrano is supplying them with answers and/or keyboard-input.

That said, I agree that any workplace with a "webcam on at all times for monitoring" policy for employees is one I would leave ASAP. Not just because it's hostile and offensive, but also because it's indicative of the company doing badly while management is busy "rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic."
Yes, I’m the engineering lead of Firebase App Hosting. If you have anything you want to talk about, inlined.dev has all the places you can find me.
A pretty decent explanation of "Maximum Extractable Value" here:

https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-mev-aka-maximal-extra...
The split personalities of "brutalist" web development (2020)
No bug in Ethereum, what lazy journalism.
> It too is a narrative to elevate an inventor--or more often investor--into an ubermensch hero role, one capable of projecting power against a dilemma that is mostly comprised of other people who failed to give the protagonist the respect/worship they were due

I've never read atlas shrugged and don't intend on it. But responding to this specific comment, if this planet had 0 creators and only bureaucrats, critics and consumers it would quickly go to hell.

Meanwhile, if we had no bureaucrats, critics, and consumers and only people that created things I'm fairly certain the world would be fine.

> Sci-Fi Author: "In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale."

Just to be clear, we aren't talking about the torment nexus. We are talking about robots that can be interacted with using human language.
I haven't had that need, sorry. What applications?
'Quantum internet' demonstration in cities is most advanced yet
You don't learn reliable lessons from fiction. The author of "Don't create the Torment Nexus" may have intended it as a cautionary tale whose lesson is not to create the Torment Nexus, but that doesn't obligate the reader to come to that conclusion.Why shouldn't we say with a couple minor tweaks and a sexier name this "torment nexus" would be pretty cool?

Conversely, most "utopias" sound like they would be pretty horrible to actually live in.
Mmm...not sure you're correct with the 'crushing it' motif. Their demos were distinctly underwhelming at IO, except for the Project Alpha one in London. The NotebookLM demo even had an 'audio pre-generated' notice at the bottom of the presentation screen in tiny letters. And their current ImageFX stuff is frankly embarrassing. The company is definitely struggling to catch up in many areas.
The mental model precludes the self awareness you describe. That’s why laws and regulators are needed: you cannot entirely take the lizard brain out of the human.

You’re not going to convince people like Mark, but government can grind slowly, forever. No one else is going to protect you from these people at scale.
I'm here to intentionally get you started on hidden CLI settings. Learn me somethin'!
I already explained in a reply:

"All these processes happen on your browser(device). The extension uses the Gmail API locally on your browser to perform all the necessary tasks. Your emails never get sent to any external server."

Hope you give it a try.