skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> > local governments have been experimenting with an incentive and penalty system for decades now.
>
> False. There were one or two towns that implemented opt-in rewards programs, in which you could get benefits like deposit waivers at the local library and other minor perks.

https://sites.ischool.berkeley.edu/blog/2024/02/23/chinas-so...

> Beyond a mere pipedream, there are currently 36 pilot programs deployed in some of China’s largest cities.

> Individual scores and grades for residents. Misbehaving (littering, jaywalking) results in score reduction and punishment; exemplary behavior (caring for aged parents) in good ratings and benefits.

> > The law is so vague that I can imagine in practice it's abused for all sorts of things
>
> You're trying to read and interpret a law for yourself - one that you admit you have trouble understanding.

No, I'm perfectly capable of understanding what the law says. It's the language itself that is vague and open to interpretation.

> Instead of trying to figure out what the legalese means for yourself, read what an expert says.

No, thank you. I don't need an "expert" to regurgitate what the law says. And what it says is simply a formalization of what localized pilots have been applying for years now, except that it's now a nationwide law.

> that it's mainly aimed at businesses (not private individuals)

Businesses are not the ones littering, jaywalking, or cheating on tests, and being posted on shaming billboards.

> I'll give you a very concrete example of how a private individual would actually interact with the Social Credit System.

Look, you can cherry pick examples all day long. I'm sure that in a country of 1.4 billion people there will be many such cases. But the reality is that there's a draconian law that is open to interpretation by local governments to punish people in whatever way they please. The law says so:

> Where local regulations have special provisions on penalty measures other than those provided for in this list, the local unit leading the establishment of the social credit system, in conjunction with relevant departments (units) may implement supplemental lists based on local regulations to be used only in that region.

All of this is hardly an issue, though. Whether or not a scoring system exists should not be the main topic of discussion, when people are being arrested or disappeared for some of this same behavior. Or is that also Western propaganda?
>> To take a photo of someone, you usually need their permission.

Still ambiguous. What level of permission do you need? Verbal permission? "Verba volant", they might change their mind and claim later that they didn't agree to the photo?

Signed permission? "Hey, mister, could you please sign this document that states you agree with me taking a picture of you?". That's a private contract, only slightly more useful than a verbal agreement because it can be contested in court.

Formal contract signed by both parties and ratified by a public notary? That's the strongest form of agreement but how practical is it for taking a picture on a bus?

Seems to me that like many laws, this one too is more for intimidation than practicality. I forgot how these are called (if they even have a name), these ambiguous laws that specify something fuzzy without a clear way of enforcing it and vague penalties. Reminds me of the (Hacker News?) story of the guy in Japan who refused to pay the TV tax (can't find it of course, or I'd have posted it here) and was threatened by "penalty", only problem is it says nowhere what the penalty is and who collects it.
I would say your position is the cynical one. Encouraging the people who don't tie their identity to their workplace to leave so that you are only left with the ones who "care" is manipulative. It reminds me of the time I went to a real estate scam seminar. At the halfway mark, they encouraged everyone who wasn't ready to sign a check on the spot not to come back from intermission.

This concept of "caring" is just a new coat of paint on "we're not just a workplace, we're a family," a strategy to get your employees to volunteer for more responsibility in exchange for kudos (rather than the pay or title they would demand if asked directly).
I appear to have GPT-4o but the iPhone app seems to be largely the same - can't interrupt it, no "emotive" voice, etc. Is this expected?
Another reminder that other developed countries are not like US. On intellectual level and as a hobby street photographer these restrictions sound ridiculous to me. But I went to Japan recently and the place is so safe you can give kids some cash and take them to take subway anywhere they want / ask anyone for help if they get lost. I am sure this degree of safety comes with tradeoffs to many kinds of freedom, but at the same time it constitutes its own very important freedom.

Let different countries be and let them learn from each other's experience?
I really like Telegram from a UI/UX standpoint (so much better than Signal), but Pavel Durov is such a sketchy character that it's starting to turn me off. How can he be touting about being secure when they still haven't implemented end-to-end encryption by default? Also so many other things if you follow Durov's channel.

(I use Telegram and Signal each for about 45% of my messaging, even though I'm in Europe where WhatsApp is so prevalent.)
It's still a great film.
I think there is too much focus on tones in beginning Chinese. Yes, you should get them right, but no, you'll get better as long as you speak more, even if your tones are wrong at first. So rather than remember how to say fewer words with the right tones, you'll get farther if you can say more words with whatever tones you feel like applying. That "feeling" will just get better over time. Until then, you'll talk as good as a farmer coming in from the country side whose first language isn't mandarin.
Video is absolutely the easier case - there's a lot more information to go on. A single blurry photo has lost information compared to the original, but you can theoretically recover that information in a video where you get to see the subject with a variety of different blurs/distortions applied.

Note that a limitation of this result is that it assumes a static scene, but that's already a typical limitation of most gaussian splat applications anyway, so it kind of doesn't matter?
I worked in product at Elastic working on Elasticsearch, which ended up trying several different things (some of which I know the broader OSS-driven community didn't like, so I'm prepared for downvotes here).

We had started off by using a series of private repos for our non-OSS features. At build time, we had a pretty complicated suite of build tooling that took all of the repos and integrated them and ran the integration tests. The biggest reason why Elasticsearch went to single repo with all of the enterprise software included (knowing that the OSS-focused community was going to backlash on it) was just how much of a hassle that was. It bifurcated everything and the results were that paying customers were upset the most.

For example: have an issue with the product? You could file a GitHub issue in public and it would get looked at quickly, but if you were a paying customer with an issue with one of the enterprise features, you had to file an issue with the support team because the GitHub repo was separate/private, and then support would file an issue in the private GitHub repo, and you'd lose complete visibility with it. It was even worse for free/trial users: they had to file an issue on our forums (since they didn't have an established support contact), after which they lost visibility. Integration tests were also hellish.

I later worked at another open core company, which at first maintained a separate codebase for its paid offering, and synchronized changes over from the open source product periodically, and things were much worse: a ton of bugs kept popping up and getting the paid offering out the door was always extremely slow because you were always playing catch up on the OSS offering.

You can go down the submodule route, but you end up relying on pretty complicated build tooling. If that's in your team's realm of capabilities, it's not a bad route to go. If you have no need for "OSS," then you can choose a non-OSS license that provides whatever restrictions you care about and bundle it up together, which is easier, but might dissuade certain users.

Regardless, licensing enforcement isn't really an issue if you're working on a B2B product: there are certain demographics that won't pay for your software, but they won't pay if you have licensing enforcement either. B2C can be a different story.
I am a PhD biophysicist working within the field of biological imaging. Professionally, my team (successfully) uses deep learning and GANs for a variety of tasks within the field of imaging, such as segmentation, registration, and predictive protein/transcriptomics. It’s good stuff, a game changer in many ways. In no way however, does it represent generalized AI, and nobody in the field makes this claim even though the output of these algorithms match or out perform humans in cases.

LLMs are no different. Like DL modules that are very good at outputting images that mimic biological signatures, LLMs are very good at outputting texts that eerily mimic human language.

However — and this is a point which programmers are woefully and comically ignorant — human language and reason are two separate things. Tech bros wholly confuse the two however, and thus make outlandish claims we have achieved or are on the brink of achieving — actual AI systems.

In other words, while LLMs and DL in general can perform specific tasks well, they do not represent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and thus will have a much narrower application space than actual AI.
Being sarcastic and then putting the end result in front of Brits could be the new Turing Test
“Profit is up 1000% and they’re creating some plants last month and hope to use advanced packaging in 2 days…” Wishful thinking and hyperbole yet again! Social media runs with these unsubstantiated claims with no verification. It’s boring and tiresome to see this versus the reality. They’re decades from being fully independent. It was only recently that Washington revoke Intel, AMD and NVIDIA licenses to export chips to Huawei.

Stop believing everything you see on social media. Think critically. Do the claims sound too good to be true? Probably are, we exist in a misinformation media environment.
I really like having a voice assistant that focuses on privacy first. I will definitely try it. always add a video to show how it works. Thank you
I need to work on a new update, but we are building an open source farming robot you may be interested in. We move slowly but steadily, and I think this will be much more practical than a humanoid (in the next 10-20 years) for saving time around the farm.

https://community.twistedfields.com/t/january-2023-update-ne...
The warranty on the base model is only 8 months, and for the higher end model only a year. This is not good!

Even worse, and likely illegal(!), the warranty has terms that are likely against FTC guidelines, like voiding the warranty if you disassemble the robot. As far as I know, these type of terms are not valid. They also include terms saying your warranty is void if third party service or parts are used - these are also not valid under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

https://unitree.com/terms/policy/

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/07/ftc-annou...

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2022/07/ftc-says-co...

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/businesspers...

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/magnuson-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
Like another comment mentioned, sigmoid curves [1] are ubiquitous with neural network systems. Neural network systems can be intoxicating because it's so "easy" (relatively speaking) to go from nothing to 80% in extremely short periods of time. And so it seems completely obvious that hitting 100% is imminent. Yet it turns out that each percent afterwards starts coming exponentially more slowly, and we tend to just bump into seemingly impassable asymptotes far from where we'd like to be.

~8 years ago when self driving technology was all the rage and every major company was getting on board with ever more impressive technological demos, it seemed entirely reasonable to expect that we'd all be in a world of complete self driving imminently. I remember mocking somebody online around the time who was pursuing a class C/commercial trucking license. Yet now a decade later, there are more truckers than ever and the tech itself seems further away than ever before. And that's because most have now accepted that progress on such has basically stalled out in spite of absolutely monumental efforts at moving forward.

So long as LLMs regularly hallucinate, they're not going to be useful for much other than tasks that can accept relatively high rates of failure. And many of those generally creative domains are the ones LLMs are paradoxically the weakest in - like writing. Reading a book written by an LLM would be cruel and unusual punishment given then current state of the art. One domain I do see them completely taking over is search. They work excellently as natural language search engines, and "failure" in such is very poorly defined.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
Thanks for the prompt response, the support for OpenDAL is amazing!
> I tried to use them but haven't really stuck with it.

I think it's domain dependent.

It's easy to recall things you encounter frequently, and difficult to recall things which are rarely encountered. Failing to recall something means taking the time to look it up.

With spaced repetition, you're making the bet that it's worth spending some time in order to improve recall for a bunch of stuff. -- The surprise is how much value you can get for how little it can cost.

It's likely a good bet for stuff like language learning (or healthsci), where there's a long tail of things you'd like to be able to recall quickly, and 'cost' of looking something up is quite high. (It's not a fluid conversation if you have to bring out a dictionary).

Whereas with e.g. programming, you're often spending time looking stuff up anyway.
I used a Huawei laptop and it's great. Huawei's build quality is significantly better than Asus. Not Apple level, but maybe half way there. Lenovo is also pretty good in quality (depending on the model though). Asus laptops are either cheap plastic or extremely thin metal that flexes - even on top end models. They also have a bad track record with support for their Tinkerboards. Not sure how the country of origin matters
There's currently this on aliexpress,
for $180k

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806181084216.html
I don't think OpenAI is doing anything particularly sinister. But whatever OpenAI has today a bad actor will have in October. This horseshit is moving rather fast. Sorry, but in two years going from failing the turing test to being able to have a conversation with an AI agent nearly indistinguishable from a person is going to be destabilizing.

Start telling Grandma never to answer the phone.
Ironically, I was like that for a while, but now use regular google search again quite a bit. A lot of times, good old stack overflow is best.
Hi, nice but I don't really understand how it works. insert a landing page and a video to explain how to edit.
Bad news, you aren't having many left, given how much content being made across social media platforms, not only Tiktok.
This could be a new genre of meta-commentary! Thanks for the recursion.
The assumption that the trajectory of LLMs leads to an actual AGI is, frankly, ludicrously optimistic. The main thing these things should be demonstrating to us is that language learning, alone, is neither equivalent to, nor a reliable signal of, general intelligence. A myna bird with orders of magnitude more long term memory does not a destroyer of humanity make, unless a human with something considerably less than general intelligence decides to hand control of a nuclear arsenal to that bird.

That said, the arrival of an actual AGI on the scene would be roughly the same as the arrival of another actual NGI… we most likely wouldn’t recognize it, wouldn’t know how to communicate with it, and would both misunderstand it and attempt to enslave and exploit it to our primarily economic ends, if we didn’t kill it reflexively because we are considerably more governed by our emotions than we are by what we presume is our intellect. And that’s assuming an LLM trained to and beyond some magical cognition emergence event horizon with the sum total of human internet-accessible verbiage didn’t kill itself instantaneously, which would be the most likely outcome of waking up to human-level general intellect with neither a body or the emotions required to understand the vast majority of the human-level “knowledge” such a model possessed.

In other words I don’t think it would do much to human society other than prove that humans aren’t as smart as they think they are.
Clearly you've experienced some kind of personality clash and/or a battle of egos. I can't fault you for holding a low opinion of him as a result, but I'm unimpressed with personal beefs being used as evidence to impeach credibility.

My point is as I wrote in both posts. George was able to demonstrate evidence of poor engineering which "reflected poorly on AMD". From this I could form my own conclusion that AMD aren't in an engineering position to become "serious contenders in AI".

The poor software engineering evident on consumer cards is an indictment of AMD engineers, and the theoretical possibility for their enterprise products to have well engineered firmware wouldn't alleviate this indictment. If anything it makes AMD look insidious or incompetent.
Show HN: Advanced search engine for microphones, inspired by diskprices.com
I'm a Tile owner (soon to be ex-owner), and I think your response is a little disingenuous. When Google announced recently they'd open up their Find My Device network to bluetooth trackers, I assumed for sure Tile would be on board. I was dismayed to discover Tile specifically has no plans to join the Android Find My Device network, unlike Chipolo and Pebblebee. So I switched to Pebblebee.

The Life360 network may be sizable but it's going to me nowhere close to the iOS or Android networks, and it's going to get a lot smaller with folks like me leaving. If Tile supported the Android Find My Device network I would have stayed.
Hey HN,

I'm a frontend developer, and I've been working on an advanced search engine for audiophiles to provide a new way to search through Amazon's microphones. This site is inspired by the famous diskprices.com.

Technically, the site is built using Next.js 13 with an APP directory, which allows the site to leverage the power of Server components, making it very useful for managing a large dataset of microphones. The Amazon product API (PAAPI V5) is used for product listings, with updates occurring every 12 hours for now. For programmatic SEO, every URL parameter combination is replaced by a dedicated slug. This allows me to programmatically generate slugs that can be indexed by Google. I'm still in the testing phase on this point as I don't want to spam the Google Bot.

In the future, I would like to further develop the product. Some ideas on the roadmap include ranking microphones according to various criteria, including the number of microphones per facet, and adding some additional secondary filters such as Amazon Choice, Amazon Prime, material type, and brand, among others. I'm also open to your ideas.

I hope this site will be helpful to you. Would love your feedback, please.
Something to remember is that spaced repetition is optimised for adults and teenagers. The memories of young children work somewhat differently and we don’t yet know what the optimal way to
teach them is.
It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually commissioned annually. This is barely sufficient to replacement of reactors that are being decommissioned and there is no growth of nuclear capacity worldwide - we have exactly as much as 15 years ago.

Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years.

Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating.

There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.
54% from a post merger spike. It's basically even with the nominal $10 SPAC pre-merger price now.
In that case, couldn't someone just make a tracker tag using GPS and a mobile connection?
That isn‘t enough reason to make these things useless. A knife can be used to kill someone and to cut meat. And we still haven’t removed the sharp edge, have we?
Technically they might be fine, but there are geopolitical reasons to avoid chinese products.
Open ai give so little information on the details of their models now that one can only speculate how they've managed to cut down inference costs.

STT throws away a lot of information that is clearly being preserved in a lot of these demos so that's definitely not happening here in that sense. That said, the tokens would be merged to a shared embedding space. Hard to say how they are approaching it exactly.
Math gets more playful and fun the more you study. The most fun I’ve had with math was when working through difficult proofs in logic, analysis, abstract algebra, and geometry.

Some of the math learned in high school can be made more fun and playful with applications such as you mentioned, or with contest math designed for high school students. For a few years now I’ve been involved with the CEMC [1] (at my Alma mater) as a grader for the Euclid math contest which I think is quite fun without requiring anything beyond high school math (doesn’t even require calculus).

[1] https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html
> So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.

When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.

But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.
Seen Incorporated on Apple TV?