skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
reminds me of this essay, a favorite of mine

> ...there’s a deeper reason... so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon... When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you? Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it... It steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards — the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.

https://archive.is/2I3T4

it's about hobbies but frankly many people can probably use adopting a similar mindset about work, relationships etc (if you love and enjoy your partner, what does it matter they're not perfect?) (if you're competent in your work and it pays the bills, what does it matter if you're not the "rock star" of the company or the CEO of Google or what have you?)

there's nothing wrong with ambition and having goals, but social media is constantly shoving the best of the best in everything in our faces and implying we need to be that person or we're less than

but we don't and we're not, lol
You can make any part of the Pyramids with primitive hand tools. In fact, material scientists have, to prove a point. Quartz is harder than the stone used for them, and diorite can be used to to smooth quartz.
The British elite is haunted by childhood demons
Yes, and coverage or discounts could be predicated on risk-reducing precautions.
https://archive.is/eVX8h
Its possible to see such scaling if involving any level of cache or I/O.
Yeah it's really just an excuse to be evil while feeling righteous and conflicted about it, and saying "You don't understand" to anyone who objects to your behavior.
> making things prettier

And even that is a matter of taste. They tend to make things resemble some combination of an Android app aesthetic and a Google Chrome aesthetic. For example, replacing dialogs with item hierarchy trees with a scrollable flat web-form-like preferences page.

At least they backed out of the switch to monochrome folder icons. 8-\
Blast from the past and very off topic.
Not a covid issue. Real sugar packets taste fine.

Really, this wasn't even crystals. Just fine white powder. Ground plaster? Corn starch? Much more likely.
Yes, I’ve tested this out. It does train, but the scaling doesn’t seem to pan out. It’ll perform slightly better than the number of trainable parameters, but never improves as you scale, so for now there’s no benefit.
If I needed to do this, I would dump the ram of the process then grep for some comment or variable name from the file and Id almost certainly find a complete copy of the source file as some string in memory somewhere.
And large amounts of the "computer" graphics in Tron are hand drawn.
Ilya and Jan Leike[0] resigned (were fired) because they believed their jobs were a temporary marketing expense? Or maybe you think you understand the risks of AGI better than them, the creators of the frontier models?

Do you think this is a coherent world view? Compared to the other one staring you in the face? I'll leave it to the reader whether they want to believe this conspiratorial take in line with profit-motive instead of the scientists saying:

“Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue.”

[0] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=beiWcokAAAAJ&hl=...
Compared to hosting other things? Nothing! It's great.

Hosting my own service rather than using a free SaaS solution that is entirely someone else's problem? There's a significant difference there. I've been running Linux servers either professionally or personally for almost 25 years, so it's not like it's a giant problem... but my work has been increasingly non-technical over the past 5 years or so, so even minor hiccups require re-acclimating myself to the requisite constructs and tools (wait, how do cron time patterns work? How do I test a variable in bash for this one-liner? How do iptables rules work again?)

It's not a deal breaker, but given the context, it's definitely not not a pain in the ass, either.
Based in the wikipedia link "hantom sightings are common throughout much of the UK, with BBC Wildlife Magazine in 2006 reporting the "top ten" counties or regions of Great Britain where claims of sightings had been between April 2004 and July 2005 were as follows..."

What does this mean? Do we have to assume they have started breeding?

Edit:
Sightings since the early 90ies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYrszfSbUE

I think it is safe to assume the little kitties have started breeding.
For instance, it's 9:30am in California, and a lot of coastal locations show negative prices for electricity: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.html

It will be like that until 2pm or so, which gives 4.5 hours to do useful stuff either for free or very cheap (as obviously, the prices will go somewhat up, if demand increases).
> “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp insisted. “We are the peace activists.”

They are literally saying, "War is Peace".
> at what point is money to extend my life better applied to others?

Depends on who the others are. If it's applied to my children, or other family, or even (possibly) really close friends... sane decisions result.

If on the other hand, it were you mihpdx (I don't believe we've ever met), then the money is always better applied to me. You could drop dead tomorrow, I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't much care if I did somehow find out. Our interests aren't even slightly aligned. Call me a monster if you like. But understand very carefully that most people are like me, even the ones pretending (mostly for social status) that they are the opposite.

> but I know it’s a decision that is being made irrationally.

It's not being made irrationally. Not even slightly. What's happening, is that some really big dorkwads are insisting that my interests (and many other people's) are different than they are. So when we act in ways that rationally move us towards our goals, these people start screeching that we're irrational. Or that "acting against our own interests".

Our collective actions are just some hodgepodge mixture of people acting and counter-acting against each other.
What does "unsound method" mean in this context? Doesn’t that mean, if it finds a bug that this may not actually be a bug? I.e. it may give false positives?
> it’s not something everyone can stick their heads in the sand about because it makes them uncomfortable.

That's a strawperson and you know it; IMHO that argument is sticking one's head in the sand to avoid the unconfortable issues raised in the article and by others: Many extreme warmongers are out there now; there's a powerful tide of embracing violence and hate, and we know where that leads.
Ah yes, the engine that brought you a health insurance industry which treats humans as numbers on a spreadsheet. One where people don't seek medical treatment because the threat of being put into financial peril is too big. This really is a better place to live, I guess.
Thanks, I think for me part of the cramp is a mental block - I spent a long time hating writing (and English lessons in particular) and being told I was bad at it/lazy.

but as soon as I could type my essays I loved English and writing.
As a resident of Bend, Oregon... it was kind of funny to read this and I'm curious about the origin of the name.
If I had to divide this war into two groups, it'd be the people that stoke fear and hatred by committing war crimes in order to consolidate the personal power and wealth, and the people having the war crimes committed against them.

Note that both groups are spread pretty evenly across Israel and Palestine.
I wonder if Adobe Photoshop has a safety team
I really admire your optimism.
I guess it depends on the definition of "heavy use." I know in Tron a few scenes were CG, and there were a few CG+live-action bits, but the majority was filmed on normal physical sets in high-contrast, then painstakingly hand-processed[1] to add the neon "glow".

[1] https://filmschoolrejects.com/tron-costumes-glowing-effect/ Thanks legions of Taiwanese animators (:
I think trained consumerism is a big part of it. People are trained to think (usually erroneously) that the solution to every problem is a product or service.

X will make me happy, Im sad because I dont have Y. There are absolutely outside forces pushing this, but there is also a deficit of cultural forces and norms pushing back. Its not that people are being bombed by advertising for expensive burials, but that they have low experience with excellent and cheap alternatives. Human culture is slow to change, and usually does so on the order of decades or generations. Any impact from things like books will be at the margin, especially since most readers are already inclined to agree.
Prof asks court to protect Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire
"""A professor has asked the US courts to confirm he has the right to release a browser extension to help people disengage with Facebook by automatically changing certain settings.

In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a Northern California federal court, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University asked the court on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to affirm the legality of Unfollow Everything 2.0, a browser extension that makes it easier to stop following friends, groups, and pages on Facebook.

"I’m suing Facebook to make it better," said Zuckerman in a statement."""
No the ones with less scruples are cutting the drug supply with harmful stuff including but not limited to xylazine and fentanyl/nitazene analogs
> Although all five Europa images from Juno are high-resolution, the image from the spacecraft’s black-and-white SRU offers the most detail. Designed to detect dim stars for navigation purposes, the SRU is sensitive to low light. To avoid over-illumination in the image, the team used the camera to snap the nightside of Europa while it was lit only by sunlight scattered off Jupiter (a phenomenon called “Jupiter-shine”).

Neat! Love how astronomers and researchers get so creative with data collection.
I was once asked to do this for an “idea guy” who burned his technical cofounder. The technical cofounder abandoned the project taking away access to the repos.

The funny thing is that the idea guy kept lying about what happened originally, but eventually confessed once everything I suggested to get access back to the repos wasn’t possible.
Eh, I struggle to say that pb has a "wire" format. A binary encoding sure.

To me wire format implies framing etc, enough stuff to actually get it across a stream in a reasonable way. For pb this usually means some sort of length delimited framing you come up with yourself.

Similarily pb doesn't have a canonical file format for multiple encoded buffers.

For these reasons I rarely use pb as an interchange format, it's great for internal stuff and good if you want to do your own framing or file format but if you want to store and eventually process things with other things then you are better off with stuff like Avro which does define things like the Object Container Format.
Especially given the massive financial assistance given to farmers in most countries, and the importance of bees to farmers
Taiwan is not a part of NATO. The US may, directly or indirectly, help to defend it, but it is not a military concern for other NATO countries.

But frankly, I find it very difficult to believe it could happen in the near future because Taiwan is already very well prepared for an invasion. So unless the Chinese leaders are as badly informed as the ones from Kremlin, they would not attempt a full-scale war over dead bodies and ruins. They attempt the opposite - to lure the Taiwanese, encourage friendly exchanges etc. A war would completely destroy everything. And I don't believe this is the Chinese aim (yet).

(I don't event mention Chinese loses because they can throw a lot of people and equipment just like Putin did and not care about huge loses.)
Really? Not even in the early oil rush?
I’ve tested specifically this (on my personal time) :) It will train but I found the loss is proportional to the number of trainable parameters. So roughly to hit the performance of a standard 70m param model, you need to train ~70m lora params anyway.
the telcos used to pressurize cables in order to keep water out of it

http://www.airtalk.com/newsletter5.html
the single-thread case ran a little slower than it should on this live demo due to a mistake on my part: `run` redirected to the Rust interpreter, rather than the C interpreter. the Rust one is a little bit slower. the numbers on the site and on all docs are correct though, and the actual speedup is ~12x, not ~16x.
"Feel the AGI." That line just isn't getting any less creepy.
It feels very difficult to get a good sense of Palantir's quality. All I know is the rabid fanbase the company has, most of whom have never used a single peoduct they make. I'd love to see some authentic experience reports.
https://archive.ph/sWLDe
War against enemies such ISIS is indeed leading to peace.
Not if it looks anything like this... Honestly I'd be surprised if AI could do it justice. In a shot showing one character talking, panning around to see the other characters that AI pasted into the scene wouldn't be enough. Those characters would also have to be animated and show appropriate attention/reactions to what was being said/going on.
> "...A CoreWeave spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company is using Nvidia GPUs as collateral for the fresh debt financing..." ;-)
> They say it is to improve existing proceedures, to make them faster/safer/better, but in the end the tech breaks free of old paradigms and gets used in the "bad" ways everyone predicted.

This new technology will improve existing procedures. How can you oppose it?

This new procedure will use existing technologies. How can you oppose it?
I think the comparison is more along the lines "might as well supply clean syringes instead of let things go their inevitable course otherwise". The point isn't about the victims then loving you and thinking you're such a stand up person, it's about why you might as well be the one that's hated but at least you know it was done better than it would have. Importantly, this is only said to apply when you are convinced there is some inevitable humanity destroying technology and you think you can deliver it in a less destroying way than it will be otherwise. It doesn't apply to things that are already present, like selling drugs.

That said, I don't think most of what Palantir actually delivers on fits this mold. They're just generally cruddy.
I agree with you on both points, but they have QA which is 1. The long-term risk team was more of a research/futurology/navel-gazing entity rather than a qa/audit function. I would say if you have any possible safety/alignment test that you can feasibly run it should be part of the CI/CD pipline and be run during training also. That's not what that group was doing.
> “Superalignment” group will be folded into broader research efforts at the company.

I think super-alignment and super intelligence are incompatible with each other. I think a huge part of intelligence is in examining the basic premises you believe in and being able to work out the implications of that. Look at the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. I don’t think we would have had the Scientific Revolution without the intellectual underpinnings that reshaped how we saw the world.

In addition, super alignment is very hubristic. We are positing that our way of looking at the world is the correct and valid way and there is no better way that could be found even by a super-intelligent entity.

So either “super-alignment” creates entities that are so crippled that it would be hard to call them super intelligent, or else it is just the equivalent of putting an internet “safety” filter on the computer of a teenager that writes open source kernel drivers for fun - something that will quickly be bypassed.

I am glad to see this pseudo-religious BS finally being got rid of.
We use a few of the endpoints in the backend. Service to service communication.

Those same endpoints are used with envoy. By our UI.

That choice was made to reduce code bloat.

Rather than maintain grpc and envoy it's easier to just maintain 1 rest API.

The service to service communication was never a bottle neck.

So it was highly prematurely optimized.

We spend way more time keeping evoy and our grpc compilers up to date and free of security issues than I would like.

It's just extra software and thus extra attack surfaces we didn't need. In retrospect
The case against dual axis charts (and what to use instead) (2018)
To riff a bit on Pirsig, those who recognise Quality seem to do a good job of finding and curating it in the wild
> Like quarantining disease

This is the opposite of sticking your head in the sand about disease. It's doing something about it, even at personal cost.
> The irony is that this is a good reminder of the harsh realities that Oppenheimer himself clearly grappled with - if you refuse to build it, someone with less scruples will.

The dilemma was quite different: if you don't do it, your enemy will beat you to it and will kill you and the people you love. It was a very utilitarian, wartime calculation.

The soft variant you're quoting is just a license to misbehave because others also misbehave - and I don't think that was Oppenheimer's qualm.
Only one minor thing wrong; it's still a leaf blower.
I should have been clearer and written foyer with tall ceilings where air flows freely between the top and bottom floor of the house.
The URL just redirects to the x.com home page.
The sizes are computed by traversing the object tree before writing it. If you wanted a super fast implementation you could reserve space for a, say, three byte VarInt and then write it as three bytes no matter what. A VarInt that is four bytes can still validly represent the number 5, even though that would normally take one byte.

The thing that pisses me off about protobuf is that the wire format doesn’t distinguish between different types of binary data: if it said “this is an object binary” then we could decompose it, even if we didn’t have the protocol definition. As it is, could be a string or an array or an object.
The important parts from the Twitter thread:

>I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research. However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company's core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.

> I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics.

> These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren't on a trajectory to get there.

Damn. This is pretty much confirming everyone's fears that Altman is going full steam ahead without as much care for safety anymore.

I'm not sure what to do about it though.
I think the big deal for power-to-gas methane isn't as energy storage, but as a feed stock for agrochemicals. There are just way too many cheaper and more efficient storage methods for electricity like pumped hydro and battery storage.

Ammonia is still only about 50% round trip efficient and I'm sure it would be a huge part of the demand for green hydrogen production. But once again, ammonia is more useful as an agrochemical than as an energy storage medium.

With regards to seasonal storage, it isn't as big of an issue as you would think. Especially since seasonal declines in solar tend to coincide with seasonal increases in wind power.

https://energybyentech.com/blog/seasonal-variability-of-rene...
> “Let’s say you’re operating in a place with a lot of civilian areas, like Gaza,” I asked the engineers afterward. “Does Palantir prevent you from ‘nominating a target’ in a civilian location?”

> Short answer, no. “The end user makes the decision,” the woman said.

It seems to me that the author of this piece doesn't understand that any system that claimed to be able to predict civilian's and combatant's locations better than someone with boots on the ground or eyes in the air on the target would be lying.

Look at something like Healthcare charts. Nurses and doctors don't have time to keep systems updated or do data entry because they are busy triaging patients and saving lives. The first thing to go when you have ten things you're supposed to do but only have time for five is data entry. This is the bog standard complaint against all the technology being inserted into healthcare.

War is the same but inverse (serving out death not serving out life), there isn't time to sit around filling in info.

Armed conflicts are dynamic environments with a need for fast decisions on limited information and unfortunately it isn't really possible to have a Google maps interface with neatly labeled bounding boxes of "don't worry the bad guys aren't allowed to go inside these buildings, only the civilians".

But if anyone would be able to keep a grasp on that information in order to limit civilian targets it would likely be those on the ground who wouldn't have time to enter their latest civilian vs non-civilian intel into a GUI for updating some targeting system, so you'd want that ultimate decision to be exactly where they've placed it, in the hands of the final end user.

Anything else would be exactly the sort of "AI controls the guns/bombs/nukes" nightmare that we all want to avoid. Imagine the end user knows that the GUI is exactly wrong, the area marked in the system to contain civilians actually contains combatants and the building next door is marked in the system as containing combatants but really contains civilians (they have had camera on both or someone with binoculars observing or something) - and the system doesn't let them 'nominate the target' that they need to. At that point you can either nominate the civilian containing building and select a munition that will destroy both targets or you can do nothing.
EU Demands Clarity from Microsoft on AI Risks in Bing
> War against enemies such ISIS is indeed leading to peace

Better example is nuclear deterrence, which has effectively ended direct great power state-on-state conflict. War is never peace. But preparing for war protects an existing one.
Glewbot scales buildings like a gecko to inspect wall tiles
FTA “I think trust in science will ultimately go up if we establish a robust culture of shareable, reproducible, replicable results,” says Frolov.

Yes. Yes it will. Even though retractions ultimately the scientific method is working as intended, too many retractions across too many disciplines causes the public to lose faith in the scientific method - and we can see that is leaving us in a very bad place and may even be one of the factors for the recent rise of populism.
As we've seen by the wonderful results in Afghanistan.
On disk source-code is not relevant. To normalize surrogate pairs for later export to UTF8, they must be decoded first:

>>> '\ud83d\ude04'.encode('utf-16', 'surrogatepass').decode('utf-16')
''
>>> _.encode('utf8')
b'\xf0\x9f\x98\x84'

(The happy face emoji was removed by HN, run line in terminal to see it.)

In other words surrogate pairs are only vaild in the context of UTF16 encoded bytes and no where else. If you're adding them into your program by hand on purpose, you're either doing it wrong or specifically to raise an error for illustration purposes.
I’m not extremely familiar with the issue but it seems the independentists are a de-facto minority, which may also be the actual reason for the boycott of the last referendum, which was already heavily biased in their factor by excluding 20% of the population