skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
French company H raises $220M to develop "Action-Oriented" AI
El Salvador taps 'volcano power' to mine $29M in Bitcoin
I suspect there’s a difference between selling to school boards and selling to individual learners.

I know college kids are using edtech, but they don’t like it much. And there was one-time purchasing during the quarantine.

And obviously Khan academy must be doing okay.
yeah, i really like the achievement system for the interactive demos. it's a fun way to make sure readers are actually engaging with the lesson, and understanding its points.
In what ways is/will he be like Elon?
it's not plutonium. it's americium
This kind of reserach, which comes with new ideas which better explain our observations, helps balance exactly the blind faith in religion.

People will always ask "where everything came from" questions. And if there is no science with plausible big-bang => background radiation... theories, you can just as easily return back to creationism.
"Ex-Deepmind employees raise $220M for "AGI" model" - https://tech.eu/2024/05/21/ex-deepmind-employees-raise-220m-...
You can tell a person's height just by looking at them — unlike other examples, you don't need any advancement in DNA science for that.
Not sure about whether it's falsifiable or not, but maybe it can affect quality of life?

I mean, imagine we do find the answer to a cause of the big bang or the fate of the end of the universe, there might as well be some knowledge in there that allows new kinds of engineering that can be useful for daily life

E.g. (silly example): understanding how to create a big bang might allow creating an entire universe from scratch with minimal compute resources, in which we can then game
robotaxis equipped with cowbells. Problem solved.
For those that don’t know - xlsx files are just zips. Change the extension and open them to see all the xml lurking within.

For what it’s worth we use xlsxwriter and are happy with it.
As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.

"Actually it's good that AI sucks because it will teach people to be more skeptical" is not a very compelling argument.
This isn't criticism, it's a witch hunt. Your argument here boils down to "he's evil" because of his movie preferences.
That’s exactly what they’re doing. FTA:

americium-241, a by-product of plutonium decay
exactly, this is why i prefer using frontend frameworks. the backend now doesn't need any more complex UI logic, and becomes much more reusable. i have been reusing the same backend code without changes for all websites that i built in the last 10 years.

even for a single website i can create multiple frontends (like a mobile client for example) without having to change the backend, because all frontends can use the same json api.
So it probably could be MORE about reducing the west's access to modern chips rather than gaining an advantage for their stuff?

I have to imagine a lot of the expertise with the EUV stuff comes from ASML which is a Dutch company, thankfully.

I have to give props to the US gov for getting the CHIPS act going and we're already seeing Fabs built in the US as a result.

This might end up being a Y2K thing, where good preparation reduced the impact.
How to build your own Perplexity for any dataset
History is full of examples, IE the Protestant Reformation, when the Catholic church was insisting that the only way to know God was through a priest, and reformers, who insisted that one could know God without a human authority intervening.
> The worry with physically destroying satellites is the amount of debris created could rapidly realize the Kessler Syndrome which in turn could prohibit humanity from launching into space.

Some policymakers are increasingly scared of this, but everyone is now in a zero sum arms race globally.

It's not just big countries/blocs like the US, Russia, China, NATO+, or India that have these capabilities, but now regional powers like Iran, North Korea, Turkiye, UAE, Saudi, Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia, etc.

40 years ago, only 2 countries could build nuclear submarines - now ~50 can.

30 years ago, only 2 countries could build 4th gen fighter jets - now ~10 can.

It takes 2 regional powers to enter a tussle that spirals into a semi-global war (eg. Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, Myanmar Civil War, Syrian Civil War, Sudanese Civil War, Ethiopian Civil War, DRC Civil War, Libyan Civil War, etc)
Yes, very fun! Did you spot the easter egg at the end?
I wrote some Python scripts last year (with the help of chatGPT) that use openpyxl and they work great.
No one is claiming that their speculative models and hypotheses are "truth". Before sufficient evidence is available, you start with a model and a hypothesis, which drives the search for evidence. Then it becomes falsifiable once you gather the evidence. I think you may have missed the explanation of science where the first step is to create a guess and that drives your experiments.

As far as "not affecting your quality of life at all", people have been saying this about cutting edge science since forever. "Time can't be relative, it's just scientists playing with math. Besides, we'll never travel fast enough for it to matter and it doesn't affect our lives anyway." Yet time dilation is an important factor in your daily life if you ever used GPS.
I was a student on one of those university boards. I highly recommend hiring a lawyer at the first hint of an issue.

My university wanted people to accept "responsibility" which students took as responsibility for their actions, not for what they were being pinned for.

Of course the students are going to take responsibility for their actions thinking that will help, and then the University does whatever with its mind already made up.

One student had trace amounts of drugs on some paraphernalia. Student didn't show up to their board hearing, so got the default suspension. Could have stayed and brought a lawyer for less than what the semester cost (instead of receiving Incompletes/Fails) and won. Oh well.
Humane, the creator of the $700 AI Pin, is reportedly seeking a buyer
I mean, are homeless encampments ever permitted? Yet they show up and are very hard to get rid of. Its not a can of worms I would want opened if I owned property on the west coast, that is for sure.
How do you get Solidworks bugs fixed, and on what timescale? We have ~20 solidworks premium seats, plus a handful of licenses for other dassault products. We've complained loudly about various issues, submitted and voted on feature requests, talked to our VAR at length and in many on-site meetings, and nothing seems to happen as a direct result. At best, a bug is incidentally fixed in a later release.

It's still better than FreeCAD, though.
What you're talking about is a stunning inability to empathize with different circumstances that is a trademark human trait. We have limited ability to empathize beyond:
self -> people just like us -> family -> friends

As soon as you leave self it gets tricky, and only harder the more different and detached. It is shocking to see in light of modern morals. In fairness the idea of empathizing with differing peoples is a relatively new virtue; at least to place a high value on this is new.

Honestly, these types of things cause me existential dread. It's just so disheartening to see smart and caring people constantly turn into psychopaths over the slightest difference.

Every time you think they've figured it out, only to be let down later. It's one thing not to SEE it, but they never understand, even after explanation. You practically have to get them to take a college course before they "get it" (poorly, but they sorta understand now).
We have two 20+ year old pickup trucks. We won't buy anything much newer than that, we don't want the unavoidable electronic infelicities that infected cars after 2005.

We can't afford anything newer either, but that's really not a consideration. We're stretching the repair of our (manual everything, even non-ABS brakes) trucks as far as it will go before we embrace the suck or modern cars that meet the Central Scrutinizer's standards.
Related: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/wearable-... | https://archive.today/h6f3W
I don't think people realize just how complicated these machines are. A remote off switch just works faster than the alternative. A steady stream of parts and experts from various locations around the world is required to keep these things operating smoothly.

Without the ASML service contract most would be unusable after a few months. The amount of technology brought to bear here is really only possible because of worldwide cooperation among thousands of vendors and tens of thousands of engineers. These machines are an extension of some pretty impressive institutions (ASML corp, for example), not just metal and glass.

If China were to invade and if Taiwan or the US fought back, we would all be in a world of hurt, economically. Taiwan makes most of the high end logic chips the world uses, and China makes many of the lower tier, but still necessary chips for things like power management, etc. With sources for these devices offline, a lot of economic activity would begin to halt. We really must avoid war at all costs.
Calling this "Brave New Words" reminds me of a recent submission:

"For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371835

> a time-honored internet tradition: pointing out that the science fictional reference point a tech founder put forward was not an aspirational one, but, in fact, a dystopia containing a warning meant to be heeded, not emulated.
There are already multiple websites that will solve math problems that the user submits and then walk through the individual steps one by one. I'm pretty sure the solutions are based on mathematics and not a trained AI.
The Psion Revo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Revo) had the same software and OS, and a way better display. It was also smaller and lighter. But, sadly, neither the storage nor the battery were removable, so unless you had a way to transfer data from the device (via IR link), it was only a matter of time before all your work was in danger of being lost.
There is an important point here; the curriculum needs to change, a lot.

There is little point in writing essays any more. We’ll need to find other ways of testing knowledge acquisition.

But also, we’ll need other menus of skills/knowledge to acquire. It seems to me that rote memorization of facts is even less useful than it was 5 years ago. However being able to synthesize facts and ideas, this is where the human edge will be concentrated.

With AI to do the grunt work, maybe we can have our kids actually building meaningful things much earlier than they would otherwise be capable of.
Plus it has detailed files.
Who under 25 has a drivers license now? The kids uber.
Skymel Previews Hybrid GPU Platform for AI Models
Skymel today emerged from stealth to preview an adaptive inferencing platform for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads that enables engines running on a local machine to invoke additional graphical processor unit (GPU) resources in the cloud as needed.

Dubbed NeuroSplit, the company claims this approach has the potential to reduce GPU costs by as much as 60% at a time when the cost of those resources is limiting the number of AI projects that an organization can launch.
I tried to do this in a previous job, it's _hard_. Our requirements were to use the math in a spreadsheet to calculate some results (basically actuaries created a set of formulae in the spreadsheet, we paste in the data and pull out the result). The best solution we found was to actually utilize LibreOffice and manipulate the spreadsheet using LibreOffice's Python API. There's no other solution that provides relatively complete implementations of Excel's functionality, and also updates cell values correctly taking into account complex formulae. And it was _painful_ and involved a very fiddly docker container image, a custom shell script with some LD_LIBRARY_PRELOAD magic, and some other hacks I don't even remember anymore.
> Someone with a better grasp of the scientific method perhaps you can answer this.

As a (recovered, former) neurobio phd it seems the "grasp" is mostly there + the clarity you want just doesn't exist here

I.e., the concept of "depression" is pretty hard to nail down quantitatively in the first place: The best model we've got is a kind of self-contained proven-by-internal-self-consistency thing bootstrapped from questionnaires, which is of course further abstracted away onto those model systems we're allowed to kill: For example, calling "how long do mice swim before giving up if you chuck them into a tank of water" is roughly equated to "amount of depression" (this is oversimplified a bit; you correlate a bunch of those measures etc. but still a lot of very weak signals). Even "relevant quantitative data" like fMRI / ECoG is bootstrapped from questionnaires when it's something undefinable like "depression"

Which isn't the end of the world, everything started out like this, it just sucks when people take these results too seriously or infer too much from them.

And even the human black-box stuff in the DSM manuals admits a lot of different subtypes, lots of different and sometimes opposite symptom clusters, etc. It is entirely possible that mechanistically "depression" is a diverse group of mechanisms all boxed up into the most familiar mainstream concept/word.
That's true but let me ask you, why then was Christ crucified? The Bible says to obey all authorities except in spiritual matters over which it (the Bible) claims they have no authority.
You asked for practical take aways, so I'll say this:

Get good at communicating and being vulnerable. I know online spaces will tell you this is dangerous, and that your partner might leave you. Someone with this sort of background needs to be 'seen', and loved for who they are, and the only way that happens is if they truly know you. Second, realize that your partner is not the sole source of all your feelings about them. You're seeing the world through trauma colored glasses, and it often helps to take a step back, take a breath and ask yourself why you're feeling what your feeling rather than acting on it immediately.
In Vermont, where activities like hunting and hiking are allowed on any land not explicitly posted to prohibit it, there is also a liability shield for property owners in the statutes: https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/section/12/203/0579...
I have personally found that success stories aren't that useful to me. Failure stories, on the other hand, are.
> If you want to learn something, and have the motivation, then reading the textbook is easily good enough

Anecdotally, I found it dramatically easier to learn math through Khan academy than from textbooks. For one, I have terrible handwriting which makes the pen and paper part messy and hard to read, and for two, Khan's lessons were broken down into much smaller, more digestible steps.

I took discrete math at Uni and had to learn it from the same Rosen textbook that many on this thread probably did themselves. If I had the same thing in an online version analogous to Khan Academy, I think I would've had a much better time. Now obviously, some of the harder problems and proofs in that book are much harder to grade automatically the way Khan does for grade school math, but that seems like something LLMs are trending towards being able to do
I'm born and raised in LA, so I have an extremely good understanding of what you're referring to. But there are so many other factors besides just labeling people as degenerates.

For example, Sweden, a very highly developed economy, only has to support less than 11 million people. That's about half of just the state of Florida's 22m. NYC alone almost has as many people as some of the countries being referred to.

They also have different laws, social structures, mental health facilities, completely different penal system, socialized healthcare — I could go on.

I don't think you can truly qualify people as simply "degenerates" when there are so many other factors.

For example, Switzerland had a major crime and drug epidemic in 1999, and opened centers in 2000 to assist with those issues — and homelessness encampments and crime effectively disappeared.

Again — it's not always that people are innately shitty, but the system around them allowing that option. I'm sure if you packed people in Sweden, let immigration skyrocket, and take away all the socialized benefits you'd see real fast the "degenerate" population grow.
It’s a good ol fashioned shallowfake
I agree that the 2017 charter hints at acceptance of 1967 borders, and that its formulation is ambiguous in this sense (my "unambiguous" comment was in the context of analyzing whether Hamas would want to be citizens of Israel -- I think their rejection of this idea is unambiguous).

I think your reading is consistent with what the document says. On its face, the document hints at accepting a two-state solution under the 1967 borders. The most charitable interpretation would be that Hamas is willing to consider a two state solution an ultimate settlement of the conflict, with the two states living side-by-side in peace and harmony indefinitely.

However, another possible interpretation is that Hamas is willing to accept 1967 borders in order to secure statehood, but after securing it (including lifting of the blockade, etc) it primarily intends to use its state as a base to attack Israel with more vigor and resources until Israel is destroyed. "As a practical matter" could easily be read as "as a short-term solution."

When I observe Hamas's behavior, the second interpretation seems far more likely to me. Even as the document was announced, they said "We shall not waive an inch of the Palestinian home soil, no matter what the recent pressures are and no matter how long the occupation." The formulation of the document seems designed to legitimize future attacks on Israel once the two states are established. And Hamas shows little interest in developing Gaza as a permanent home for any of its people, as you would expect if they truly see it as a core part of their future state, preferring instead to preserve refugee status for as many people as possible.
Noctua unveils its $100 desk fan
The new part is that it's using Americium. That's it. It's a challenge to use the material for various reasons but the wonderful thing about it is that it's easier to get hold of apparently.

The UK, in fact, has a problem with its plutonium stockpiles being polluted increasingly by Americium and now there's something it can be used for.

There are significant disadvantages (lower power per weight, high gamma ray activity) and some upsides (longer half-life by a big factor).
Another bit of ignorance: they refer to 'commons' as if that meant, in English, unrestricted public use or access. It doesn't. A commons is a piece of land with specific usage rights for specific people - e.g. local farmers allowed particular grazing rights. "give the commons back to the public" implies a history which this country has never had.
> "Access rights do not extend to motorised activities...

This seems problematic as there are remote properties that are only accessible through long trails. Stuff like ice fishing spots where you might need to snowmobile a few kilometers. Same with ATVs for deep woods camping.

Personally, I have a registered trail through land I own and have no problem with it. I hope people get it to enjoy since I don't get enough chances to. I can't even get to it myself without passing through a dozen different lots.
This is the purpose of LLMOps. To provide guardrails for precise output to prevent hallucination.
Or they like the buffer space. Between my smaller amount of property and my two neighbors, we’re collectively on about 75 acres. (My house is the property’s original 1820s farmhouse.) I’m not sure the rest of the property would be buildable anyway.
TBH at this point I'd pay for anything better on Linux.
Another way to look at it is to recognize that all teachers have limitations. Humans often convey misinformation too.
Having gone to university in Boston at a few different institutions, this is completely true. It's in the water. I think a lot of people never get out of the mindset, either.
Following up, Germany has too much solar, and needs more transmission and storage it appears (or load shifting to daylight hours): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/solar-pan... | https://archive.today/6cDAY

https://research.sebgroup.com/macro-ficc/reports/49776

"German electricity prices are collapsing during the sunniest hours of the day as the country is flooded with solar power, potentially curbing profitability.
The price of power during daylight hours over the past 10 days was €9.1 per megawatt-hour compared to €70.6 during the rest of the day as the number of solar installations continues to increase across the country, SEB AB wrote in a note.
This means on sunny days, output can outstrip demand leading to negative prices in the market, with the grid unable to handle so much power and insufficient storage capacity. Although many producers are not directly exposed to the spot prices, these trends bring down revenues overall.
Total installed solar capacity soared to more than 80 gigawatts at the end of 2023, according to the bank, 30 gigawatts higher than average demand."
Not sure why you are being downvoted here. It's a fair point and properly escaping your data is only one part of the overall security picture but you should also be strictly validating data at the inputs to your system too.
Matter cools when universe expands. Where does that energy go to? I would expect that delta E = delta V (with some clear way to represent volume in Joules).

Shouldn't dark energy density also fall?
> I think there's something to also be said about too many people failing once and not trying again.

Yes!

If you're an entrepreneur, short term failure is by far the most likely outcome. Successful entrepreneurs are the ones that keep trying until they finally hit on a success.
Why would a person go this route instead of a higher-level scripting language (Python, JS, Ruby, etc.) or a full-blown binary (Go, Rust, etc.)?

I don't get it. Asking not to be rude but to be educated.
As an IT and data analytics manager in ed tech, I agree, there is no money in ed tech. I make a customer support rep salary. It's ridiculous.
Job once had a requirement to generate reports in XLSB format.

Failed to find any Linux-based FOSS solution. Had to run a Windows Server.
Blog post is now live:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40442039
- https://jnnnthnn.com/how-to-build-your-own-perplexity-for-an...
Came here to point this out, as a history teacher who is often told by students they use phone apps for math.
Drivers in SF routinely do things that make cyclists feel unsafe. Waymo's don't.
There's like, the whole part that makes it go that is pretty valuable.

https://stealthev.com/product/tesla-performance-rear-drive-u..., there is 12k retail, maybe a few thousand on the black market... sounds pretty lucrative.
> We should not give a sneaky, deceptive and manipulative person this much power over our future.

I think this should be applied to our government. In my opinion, it is a failing in the structure of our government that those running the country control the police and appear to rarely be investigated unless by the request of a political opponent. They are seemingly outside of the law. It would be better if they were under perpetual investigation; forever kept in check. We should have assurance that those leading our country are not villainous traitors.