skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is such a bad analysis, I don’t even know where to start.
Let me start with the strongest point that this article tries to make:

1. Big Tech will catch up to OpenAI, and yet one year after GPT-4 release, no one has caught up to OpenAI, in fact the only model that beat gpt4 on lmsys is gpt4o lol. This is on benchmarks, if you see in User Space, OpenAI is > 80% and now with gpt4o being released for free, (there’s no other model that comes even close that’s available for free) they will cement their lead even more.

2. Some weird argument about compute becoming prohibitively expensive. MSFT has already promised to build a 100 billion data center. If your bar for judging success is AGI then maybe, but with the compute we already have a useful AI that generals billions in annualized revenue for OpenAI. So I’m not sure why you’d think this won’t keep improving for at least the next decade. There are so many jobs that can be automated before we reach AGI

3. OpenAI lost cracked researchers. OpenAI lost people in the super alignment team, none of the top research leads who implemented GPT4 have left. Ilya arguably was just coasting for the past few years (he’s not credited with any specific contribution in gpt 4 or 3.5). The most capable people in OpenAI are still present at OpenAI

so yeah not a great article
Can someone explain this? Isn't it possible for the global optimum to be also be the right generalisation optimum?
Retrospex: Convert images to fit Commodore 64 graphic modes
This is how the subs were knocked offline in Terminator III
That's not a world I want to live in as it would have made it impossible for me to study at University, impossible for me to start my career, impossible for me to leave my hometown, and many other things.

I think you're blinded by hate for wealth.
And almost all equity agreements do exactly that - give the company right of repurchase. If you've ever signed one, go re-read it. You'll likely see that clause right there in black and white.
"You're holding it wrong" again
Ask HN: Building Audio Mashups with a programming language
I want to learn to make audio mashups. I don't have lots of money to spend on things, and I process things best with text, thus I would like to get some suggestions on how to script / program audio mashup creation.
It's not just choice but access. The access to see a specialist without waiting months. The access to see a different provider if you don't like your care. The access to pay cash for services. Choice is also underrated.

Those same people you say can't afford healthcare are the ones that are heavily subsidized by others through ACA, free community health plans, or Medicaid.

Healthcare is not a commodity despite your claim. It requires labor.

It seems most people are generally satisfied with their health insurance in the USA as opposed to the UK (see links below). In fact, the satisfaction from employer provided healthcare was much higher pre-ACA than it is currently. The middle class got shafted with increased premiums and deductibles to help subsidize those with low income. This has led to lower healthcare utilization rates in the middle class. The rich don't care since it's a marginal cost relative to their income/wealth. And, the biggest spenders (elderly) don't care since they are mostly on Medicare.

Most of the countries that report high satisfaction with their socialized medicine are both rich and have a low population count.

---

https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/poll-finding/kff-surve...
Most insured adults (81%) give their health insurance an overall rating of “excellent” or “good,” though ratings vary based on health status.

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/public-satisfacti...
Overall public satisfaction with how the NHS runs now stands at 24%
the very notion of "IP" or "this idea is mine and therefore all copies of it owe me royalties" is absolute nonsense and while not great in normal circumstances,

the coming of digital media and the internet make it 100% a bad thing to have because it breeds digital scarcity

plagiarism is kind of silly. the only contribution from that mindset is that it allows for tracking of following the same ideas as explored by different people
seems like apple is a sell
GTA V's map ported to Leaflet
>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete.

Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area.

Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!
Where does the extra speed come from?
this sounds like it should maybe be a SHOW HN: post but I guess that's up to you.
Bend a Parallel Language
The programmer of a modern PC game knows that they will be using shaders, and can arrange for them all to be compiled and sent to the GPU during a loading screen. That eliminates the lag, because there is no delay when choosing which shader to use for the next triangle. On the other hand it makes the loading screen take longer.

Meanwhile the programmer of a console game, not using shaders, could set GPU registers to any configuration they wanted just before rendering the next triangle. You have to actually play the game to find out what configurations it programs into the GPU, because those configurations are not neatly organized into a set of discrete shaders. Even then there is no guarantee that you found all possible configurations used by the game. The videos in the article provide a good example: the player fires a gun with luminous bullets, so on that frame the walls and floors need to be rendered with an extra light source. That requires reconfiguring the GPU to take that light source into account, then changing the configuration to render the weapon itself, then changing it again to render the HUD, and so on.

Now imagine that you go to a place on a different level where the walls are not shiny, and it doesn't bother to render the walls with the extra light source. Or it renders them with extra vertex lighting but not extra specular lighting. Now combine that with every type of wall and floor in the game; they might all need a unique shader to be lit correctly by that one gun. To find all possible GPU configurations you need to fire that gun, and every other, near every single different type of wall and floor texture used in the game. And there are a dozen different guns.

And then you need to do it all again while wearing the night–vision goggles, because that causes everything to be rendered with a different configuration yet again.

Every one of those unique combinations needs to be made into a shader, and there’s just no way to be sure that you have actually collected all of them. Or you can write a single Ubershader that can, by using branches, loops, and other advanced tricks, emulate the entire capabilities of the emulated GPU. Then you can program the Ubershader by sending all of the emulated GPUs register values as uniforms.
Well technically because India is not a black market, more like a grey market. They didn't pay for IP, Indians just copied the drugs, but they achieved their goal - selling affordable medicine with good enough quality to an average Indian.
Therein lies the issue. The second you throw idealistic terms like “don’t be evil” and __OPEN__ ai around you should be expected to deliver.

But how is that even possible when corporations are typically run by ghouls who enjoy relativistic morals when it suits them. And are beholden to profits, not ethics.
> NLRB rule against severance agreements conditioned on non-disparagement

Wait that's a thing? Can you give more detail about this/what to look into to learn more?
Yet another confirmation that declarative UI is the way forward. React Native is just an implementation detail, just like Flutter is another one.

Forward. Declarative.
Ha ha, but no. For starters, copyright falls under federal law and contacts under state law, so it’s not even possible to make this claim in the relevant court.
In this context, what does the author mean by 'Zero-Shot'? From what I read on Wikipedia [1], it's about the model performing a task without specific training data for that task. But all of the experiments in the post seem to involve the model working without additional training data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-shot_learning
Anecdotally my experience with generative AI is that the valid output space is very tiny especially under a restrictive prompt, i.e. homework question, even smaller when the output also has to be a correct answer. Using a riskier decoding scheme only generates output that is paraphrastic to each other. So lexical similarity should catch most of the naive prompter.

Subjectively, if a student can knowledge-guide an LLM to generate response from a specific perspective, I think it is very debatable whether such usecase should be outright punished.
I don't think there has been much change since this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583349

WebGPU is getting close to general support which will make things a bit faster but compute isn't as much of the issue as ram.
> and yet one year after GPT-4 release, no one has caught up to OpenAI

You're wrong, Claude 3 Opus beat OpenAI’s GPT-4 in Elo rating just a month ago. They since lost the top position, but they are at ELO 1246 compared to GPT-4 at 1250 and GPT-4o at 1287. They are bottlenecked at GPT-4 level with small variations. That's the issue. Why have they stopped advancing? The gap between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 is so much wider than that between GPT-4 and GPT-4o

https://medium.com/@simeon.emanuilov/claude-and-gpt-4-top-le...

The explanation is that we have exhausted the sources of high quality human text. All providers train on essentially the same corpus. Architecture variation doesn't matter. Data is king, and AI used up all the human data.

My take on the path forward - it is easier to imitate than to innovate. LLMs up to now are mostly imitative. In order to become innovative they need to learn from things, not just from people. It's a social process, based on evolution of ideas. It's not unlike DNA and language, intelligence is social. It takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole world to train an AGI. Humans also take 20 years of experience based training before becoming truly innovative at the edge of human knowledge.
>Some IP addresses are “cleaner” than other addresses

All IP addresses are equal, but some addresses are more equal than others. - George Orwell
GPT-4o hit 54% accuracy on CodeContests with AlphaCodium, up from 48% for GPT-4T
Transforming the National Gallery, one painting at a time
How many sources do you need to steal from for it to no longer be considered stealing? Two? Three? A hundred?
The point isn't where you live or die. The point is that we are willing to spend more for a good product, when that product isn't software (I don't think that is true) he wasn't saying "we buy jam but not software" he was saying "we are willing to spend more money on artesian jam than on good quality software"
Yes, yes, offshore is bad, onshore is great, easy like here.

But this isn't somebody trying to make things work. This is somebody sabotaging a project because he disagrees with an approach to the problem. I feel uneasy about it.
But we can have an explanation, which can be falsified by arguments, without needing to directly test the inside of black holes with instruments.

> Now my reply to instrumentalism consists in showing that there are profound differences between "pure" theories and technological computation rules, and that instrumentalism can give a perfect description of these rules but is quite unable to account for the difference between them and the theories.

I think that's the right quote, Popper often lets me down when I want something terse and uncomplicated.
That's not a defense.

If imaginary cloud provider "ZFQ" uses 10MW of electricity on a grid and pays for it to magically come from green generation, that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

There is no free lunch here; "we buy our electricity from green sources" is greenwashing bullshit.

Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads. By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

The US, for example, has about 5GW of solar manufacturing capacity per year. NVIDIA sold half a million H100 chips in one quarter, each of which uses ~350W, which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power. That does not include power conversion losses, distribution, cooling, and the power usage of the host systems, storage, networking, etc.

And that doesn't even get into the water usage and carbon impact of manufacturing those chips; the IC industry uses a massive amount of water and generates a substantial amount of toxic waste.

It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands over how much rare earth metals a Prius has and shipping it to the US from Japan, but ask about the environmental impacts of AI and it's all "pshhtt, whatever".
The paper was published on Friday.
They can be very big, gor example https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220721-the-worlds-large... https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/giant-crystals-naica (Note that this crystals are not made of "table salt", they are made of "dehifrated paster". But in theory you can make crystals of table salt this big with enough time.)
What very easy?

"Great troubles he had in both but little he did PSEUAILE in the latter, before he had over come the FIRA and therefore minding to CHADILE the rebels..."
Posy is a gem.

https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic

KRAZAM is criminally underrated.

https://www.youtube.com/@KRAZAM

This guy is pretty fun too but a bit more zoomy

https://www.youtube.com/@programmersarealsohuman5909
It freaks me out too. At the same time, the fact that we know so much about biology comforts me - we can build our own little machines :)
I can understand defamation, but it's hard for me to understand disparagement. If i sign one of those contracts with Coca-Cola and later on I publicly announce that a can of Coca-Cola contains too much sugar. Am I in breach of contract?
I find plotting two correlated but unrelated data series (like temperature and humidity) can be fine.

But the article chooses the worst possible dual axis charts where both data series not only measure the same thing (GDP) but share the same units (dollars). What you actually have is a multiple data series chart with actually one axis but you made two to be confusing.
So, the law has this concept of 'de minimus' infringement, where if you take a very small amount - like, way smaller than even a fair use - the courts don't care. If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low, so courts aren't likely to care.

If you're only training on a handful of works then you're taking more from them, meaning it's not de minimus.

For the record, I got this legal theory from Cory Doctorow[0], but I'm skeptical. It's very plausible, but at the same time, we also thought sampling in music was de minimus until the Second Circuit said otherwise. Copyright law is extremely malleable in the presence of moneyed interests, sometimes without Congressional intervention even!

[0] who is NOT pro-AI, he just thinks labor law is a better bulwark against it than copyright
Why indeed? But that’s nobody’s business except OpenAI and its former employees. Doesn’t matter if it’s not legally enforceable, or in bad taste. When you enter into a contract with another party, it is between you and the other party.

If there is something unenforceable about these contracts, we have the court system to settle these disputes. I’m tired of living in a society where everyone’s dirty laundry is aired out for everyone to judge. If there is a crime committed, then sure, it should become a matter of public record.

Otherwise, it really isn’t your business.
We’ve tried. A lot. Custom frameworks and all.

There is really no way to make the ensemble behave with an acceptable level of consistency.

Where we ended up is now having a frontier model generate a whole tree of possible execution plans, and then have the user select one of those path, and then we just run whatever the user chose in a plain sequence until the next decision point that needs user approval.
I was wondering this too
Shaders as concept exists since 1980's,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RenderMan_Shading_Language

Just two examples, SIGGRAPH has plenty of paper on the subject.
If you can't sell, it's worthless anyway.
> ethanol as an anti-solvent to accelerate crystal growth

You usualy want something that evaporates very slowly to get big nice crystals.
It's not a copyright violation if you voluntarily provide the training material...
??

They are displaying emergence. They might as well be the walking definition of it.
Homelab network routing means pfsense, opensense, vyos, ubiquity.

What does this product have to do with "routing" at all? How is it a router?
> Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.

Large language models are not "smart". They do not have thought. They don't have intelligence despite the "AI" moniker, etc.

They vomit words based off very fancy statistics.

There is no path from that to "thought" and "intelligence."
The upper limit is on human text, especially of very high quality and original. But if LLMs use other sources of learning signal, like AlphaZero who trained in pure self play, that has no upper limit. It's just a slow, iterative process, and it requires social aspects.

The path ahead to AGI is deceitful, there are no gradients leading towards it. It's based on exploration and discovery. It works in populations for reasons of diversity - evolution is that way. And evolution is a slow process, not a singularity kind of event.
I don’t know but once vision AI reacts to traffic conditions accurately within 10ms it’s probably a matter of time before they take over your steering wheel. For other jobs you’ll need to wait for robotics.
> For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet.

Yes, but:

(1) OpenAI salaries are not low like early stage startup salaries. Essentially these are highly paid jobs (high salary and high equity) that require an NDA.

(2) Apple has also clawed back equity from employees who violate NDA. So this isn't all that unusual.
That is tautological... You buy what you want to own???
Thanks for considering local llms!
GC shaders are loosely based on GLSL, and OpenGL compilation model, even though GX(2) isn't OpenGL.
And this right here is why the Julia crowd is awesome...

A great article inspires everyone to participate in the fun.

Cheers =3
What you appreciate has little to do with whether we should assume others are thick-skinned. If someone has always been knocked down they will struggle to positively accept criticism regardless of how well meant it might be.
Why is an employee obliged to 'make things work', if those very same things are going to threaten their job?

I'm also not certain how this is sabotage. If executives treat developers like interchangable factory line workers, then its important there is a like-for-like comparison between the contractor workers and the onshore ones. Ie working with minimal guidance and high quality standards.
From you comment I get the sense that you didn't read the piece.

There was no sabotage.
It really goes to show that hallucinated restaurant recommendations are everyone’s problem
Interesting that the examples use XML for structuring/annotating the prompts. Is there any available comparison of using XML, JSON, or even Markdown for prompts and structured output? Markdown would seem like the prompt format with the least friction/verbosity, but I wonder if it would have a qualitative effect on the model output.
Why is a random news post about a road closure on HN?
4o groks realtime video; how far away are we from letting it control robots bruv?
One thing to remember is these older consoles don't have the same concept of a "shader" as we do today.

Go back far enough and you'll find the industry trying to settle on quads or triangles for rendering (and we all knew who won)

The games were given basically an immediate mode API into the graphics card and they could do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, without warning.

The stutter happened when they were translating the API mentioned above into modern GPU shaders.

When it was on the CPU - They had to determine the effect, generate and compile the modern shaders, and upload that to the GPU, sometimes hundreds of times a second. Then the GPU would take over and display.

Uber shaders took that entire pipeline and moved it into the GPU.

This was low level emulation, just still hitting limits of modern CPUs.
It's the same guy who wrote the "I lied to the CTO" post recently, which has a similar air of "this is a toxic workplace and I hope I never work with any of these people".

There's also something about the style of writing that makes me think that if someone else at the company would have told these stories, they'd have told them very differently.
This brought this other video to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOJ3yCK8pI

See also: https://github.com/shaunlebron/blinky

Using non-standard projections in Quake.
And yet, you could try to register with:

Yahoo Mail

Hotmail

Protonmail

Fastmail

AOL

Etc.

Meanwhile, if you can't use discord, then You're locked out of all of discord forever. And discord is like the 10th Gen of "hot new chat apps", what do we do when it starts to die (because Discord will probably start dieing in the next 10 years)? Just lose everything in all those discord groups, like we lost ICQ and MSN messenger and AIM and Skype?
Wow. Contains many examples of success and incorrect deductions, and statistics representing success rates.

A really long document.
Only UNIX based OSes have a single hierarchical filesystem with mount points.

Windows did not choose that approach only to be diferent, rather that is what everyone else outside Bell Labs was doing.
Previously Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code [0] (326 points, yesterday, 157 comments) [1] (6 points, 1 day ago), related
Winamp is not going open source. Here's what it is doing [2]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383029
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40385888
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40394643
I don't know why copyright is getting involved here. The clause is about criticizing the company.

Releasing an LLM trained on company criticisms, by people specifically instructed not to do so is transparently violating the agreement.

Because you're intentionally publishing criticism of the company.