skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Surely it can't be harder to learn the fundamentals of shell scripting than to learn whatever flavor-of-the-month alternative is?
I've been using GNU/Linux for ~10 years, and Bash never clicked for me. Meanwhile, picking up other (not all) programming languages in the meantime occurred naturally, without much effort.
At the same time, some of my friends picked up unix shell scripting just fine, even if typical programming is harder for them.

I suspect some people have trouble with the syntax used by Bash, and languages like Perl. But I can't pinpoint what causes it.
I’m not saying this to try to start a fight or anything. You strike me as a kind person, so I’m going to give this a shot.

I am a bit of a contrarian about lots of things. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known were major contrarians.

Are Linus Torvalds or RMS contrarians? What about Richard Feynman or Tesla?

I don’t really know if any of those examples would be widely considered contrarians, but my point is that people are multi faceted. Dismissing a person in a broad manner for unpopular opinions in one arena, strikes me as a religious mindset.

Does everyone have to pass a purity test before their opinions are able to be considered? Is that healthy?

Thank you for any consideration you can give this. I truly do not mean to start a flame war. One more thought experiment: is it ok to learn woodworking from an Amish person who likely would have wildly diverging views from most people?
People hate success. People hate success even more if it threatens their livelihood. openAI has launched a direct assault on 'experts', especially experts who aren't hands-on. So, their natural response is to attack the figure head of the AI revolution.

Twitter / HN although have many smart people, if you are addressing a mass market, you can completely ignore their opinions.

So, go Microsoft -- integrate AI directly into the OS.

go Sam -- built the biggest, baddest LLM model out there

Google, if you still haven't learnt the lesson of ignoring haters and taking risk, you have only yourself to blame.

Don't let 100 loud voices come in your way to serve 8 Billion customers
Does anyone have recs for doing really low level performance tuning on Apple Silicon? Xcode Instruments isn’t very easy to use or interpret. Things like what % of time is spent on memory stalls, simd units, etc
I definitely agree that Sam Altman is much less popular now than in the past.

Think this is inevitable given the current politics of tech. In my view, it seems obvious that tech has done a lot of good in the world, but this seems to rapidly becoming the minoritarian position.

The politics around tech nowadays seems extremely characterized by ressentiment. Traditional targets of popular sentiment like east coast tycoons & financiers have been supplanted by tech workers and CEOs as can be seen by the rise of the 'tech bro' narrative (despite the fact that most tech workers I know are by far the least bro-y of the professional classes.... they are more on the autism spectrum than doing typical bro-y things associated with finance culture).

I take solace in the fact that this mostly seems to be a phenomenon among the chattering class. When I leave DC, LA, and NYC, people mostly just seem really impressed with the progress being made.
I started to, but then never completed it. Typical dropout behavior ;)
It will only open the URLs after presenting a confirmation banner that says: "open this URL? http://example.com/", or if you command-click on a link.
> This kind of comparison always neglects to consider the fact that any given European country is much smaller and much more homogeneous than the US. Which US state are you comparing to?

I'm aware of the criticism of Apples to Oranges. I assume given such a basic level of criticism on any comparison between the US and Europe that it's no longer remotely relevant because to any study ranking would clearly account for that.

Oxford Economics just released their 1000 cities index, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/new-york-...

The US dominated in the economic advantage, and europe dominated in the quality of life index.
This article doesn't help its case by using such an inflammatory title and headings like "India’s plot against America". We all know the clickbait standards of modern media, but good grief that's bad.

We've toned down the title above but if someone who actually reads the article can suggest a more accurate and neutral title, preferably using language from the article itself, we can change it again.
javascript fatigue
Perhaps it is regional. I grew up in a rural area that was very white.

We had issues with people riding dirtbikes and tearing up our land leading to sand traps. We had vehicles and tools stolen, and one case of home burglary. Most common was hunters trespassing to hunt game we cultivated, and sometimes shooting towards our house.

Im sure some of these people were poor, but my distaste for trespassers doesnt come from that.

property rights and no trespassing sings provide a practical tool to for protecting your property. You might not see someone snooping around your garage, but you are more likely to detect them if they are not allowed within a mile of your house.
Perhaps there's a simple explanation but why does 24GB of VRAM offer such a large relative uplift in parameter count? (is memory bandwidth a factor rather than just the total memory amount?)
I'm sure there have been more expensive UX failures (Three Mile Island?) but if there's ever a Wikipedia list of them I'm sure this will be on it.
>Much of that has been improved for the next release.

Isn't that what OSS project always say?
which absolutely don't matter. The dumbest thing you can do is worry about what Twitter/HN or the decel crowd thinks. (Google fell in that trap and still recovering from it)
Given the land's Native American heritage, the ranchers leaning "We were here first" argument is... really something.

Private property rights are only as good as the government that recognizes them. Keep in mind that the government that gives you private property rights (California in this case) also has the right to take as much of your land as they want for 'public use'. If the government wants to play hardball, it is perfectly reasonable for them to build a road across the land and open it to the public. You can't stop them, your only recourse is to argue how much they owe you for doing it.
Yes, this model works in many cases.

For example, ask the (better, costlier) Claude Opus to generate high-quality prompts, which get fed into (worse, cheaper) Claude Sonnet.
Yep. When I first saw how great AI was at answering my questions, I imagined myself talking to it every day to learn everything I'd ever wanted to know.

Turns out, what I actually want to know is just that small subset of things I need to know to get by, plus maybe a little extra for variety. And I consider myself intellectually curious. I have multiple college degrees, one of which I got purely for the fun of it.

So if I can't bring myself to get AI to teach me things, I can't believe that those less intrinsically motivated will be able to either.
You're also trading some amount of risk due to not having newer safety features. For example electronic stability control has been shown by study after study to reduce accidents. With your manual brakes there's simply no way to apply the brake to one wheel only to pull a vehicle out of a skid.

Example study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2014.9...

> In line with previous results, this study concludes that ESC reduces the risk for single-vehicle injury accidents by 31% when controlling for various confounding factors related to the driver, the car, and the accident surroundings.
There are mods for skyrim right now that run an NPC's dialog and lore through a small 7B model outputs text dialog. Heck if you wanted you could run a 2B whisper model and get reasonably decent voice output.

It's all very exciting, if a little janky.
I would say that MIT has jumped on the entrepreneurship train (for better and worse) much more wholeheartedly in the decade since this account of an even older (!) anecdote.

That's not to say that the startups aren't doing hard tech and they're still different than west coast startups. However, scientists are perfectly fine at using the scientific method for business development once you explain it to them and are much smarter about getting initial revenue and market validation and know perfectly well it's important -- if you mentor them even a little bit.

MIT started working much harder to explain this in the mid '00s when it truly was much more like what this story says.
Ocean carriers already optimize and it’s odd to have the article suggest they don’t. The company Sofar Ocean (https://www.sofarocean.com/products/wayfinder) does it in a particularly interesting way and actually has people using it, rather than a theoretical analysis of a small number of voyages
OpenAI's latest blunder shows challenges facing Chinese AI models
I agree that he should have been honest, but from the opposite perspective.

Altman should have said, "Yes, we made the voice similar to this washed-up actress, but her voice is not much different from anyone else with similar regional upbringing, year of birth, habits, and ethnic background, so we invite anyone else born in the mid-eighties, raised in Greenwich, and with Danish heritage, to sue us too. We'll see how well you do in court. Otherwise, get fucked."

This whole thing with anybody giving a shit about your voice, which isn't even yours, as it's a product of your environment and genes, and will be strikingly similar to anyone with similarities thereof, is insane.

Altman shouldn't have used weasel words, I agree. He should have owned it, because it's a total non-issue, and the people upset about it need to be shamed as the Luddite assholes that they are.
He has a whole laundry list of sleezy actions and abusive behaviors.
Actually....Pachelbel used a major III
Well here's something that will be taken as an inflammatory comment, which I nevertheless believe with absolute certainty and will hold to despite the inevitable loss of karma/banning:

Anglosphere countries cannot be trusted with this level of access to another person's property. If the change gets through, people will abuse their rights, overstep, overstay, and leave a mess behind them; owners will complain bitterly, and some owner who has enough land or sway or title will complain strongly enough to the right person, and this will be dialled back. If you wait 50-70 years, it'll come back for another go.

I know Anglosphere mentality. I'm American, but have spent 21 years in Europe, living in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and travelling extensively in Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK. Folks differ in their attitudes toward collective responsibility and respect for others and their things. Not only that, but that's what's germane to this discussion.
I'm not really sure this is Altman's "Fall from Grace" moment, per se, because I'm not sure it's truly about him, even if it seems to be entirely his fault. I do think this has a chance to really sour everyone - including lawmakers - to AI companies and their wanton ways. The "just train on anything you can find" policy will surely come into question now. To quote a tweet quoted in the article:

> I think [Scarlet J] humanized the entire story of these companies stealing from everybody.

It was absolutely a risky move, and even if they're "innocent" of using her voice, the PR damage is done. It was a bold gambit for attention, and now we have to see the outcome. I think it's too bad too, because we've seen a ton of cool uses of LLMs and this "new age of AI" playing out. Is it a bit of hype? Yes. Is there useful tech there too? Absolutely - and I don't want OpenAI to ruin it by foolishly trying to give their CEO a cute cinematic moment.
> You are the one accusing Hamas of suppressing press freedom in Gaza ...

Yes I am. Google it for 5 seconds and ...

https://rsf.org/en/country/palestine
It's approximations based on measured observations all the way down.

Keep in mind, we cannot explain what matter and energy are. We measure and work in terms of waves. What is "waving?" We literally do not know.

The thing is NOT the wave. Period. But everywhere we look we detect that literally everything is vibrating/oscillating/waving. Each improved microscope/observation/meaurement reveals space and some type of vibration.

However, we rely on the observed, measured properties to do things. Generate (harness) and use electricity and perform (encourage) chemical transitions and combinations, for instance. We have a significant well of practical knowledge.

But the nature of existence and the grand cosmological scheme? Probably not going to crack that. It's very fun to try and you learn practical things along the way, though.
I find your harshness, in response to a purely positive and informative comment, to be terribly arrogant and annoying, like someone pretending to be as smart as a smart 15 year old.
First, I want to address the precision of your response:

The content you link to is about AGI, which is a theoretical concept, and it is not at all clear that the path to AGI is incremental from our current approaches.

Regardless, it really feels like a pure marketing move to link concerns about AGI to our current tool chain of decision engines, content generators, and spell checkers.

Nothing that is publicly known about what OpenAI or its foes are currently working on suggests in any way that it should be linked to the emerging of AGI.

Now to the more general points made in the content you link to:

As the author states in the preamble, this is a "poorly organized list of individual rants".

And it seems that none of those make a good and plausible case for why even the theoretical idea(!) of AGI is particularly dangerous. Of course, with a good deal of good will, I can follow most of the ideas listed, but it feels forced and certainly requirement heavy.

Remember that the state they are thinking about is is in the future (probably far), and everything they write is hypothetical.

It's like if we learned to throw a stone for the first time, and suddenly the village is full of alarmist people discussing high-minded ideas about "what if everyone is suddenly thrown away, by which we mean displaced at high speed in a vaguely known direction - by a force we yet can not understand?

It's mostly not serious or related to the current technologies.

If someone is alarmist and wants to be taken serious they should be required to make an actual argument, themselves. .. without fleeing into references, vagueness or unnecessary complexity.
Who writes the list? Can their definition of dual use be relied upon to not be self serving?

Given the people in question are the ones with a vested interest in stamping out as much life as possible, I find it difficult to believe that this is even a tenable stop point for cognitive processing for anyone but someone who couldn't be bothered one way or the other.
OP replied to my comment and I now see that it makes sense as an observation. The narrative I was referring to is something that I see common in discussions surrounding abuse; "there's nothing to be done about it; [people should] just grow a thick skin." If we agree that this exists, then I posit that it's a toxic thing to say to someone who's coming forward and saying that they're suffering from this. It's also toxic to use that as a way to dismiss measures that we can build in technologically to combat abuse, like building blocking mechanisms or modifying them to make them better. Hope that clarifies things.
> need to know of a million tiny gotchas to implement even the simplest task safely and portably

While this is clearly exaggeration, I'm not sure I find much merit in the argument.

C is full of gotchas, footguns, and a tremendous threat vector. But it is also the standard for many uses.

Yes, bash has legacy cruft, and potentially confusing ways of doing things. But for the realm in which it operates, it is extremely effective. We can make an argument for what we believe the perfect shell scripting language would be--but that doesn't exist. Bash is the current tool for addressing this category of problems.

The intention of this bullet point was to illustrate that just as I wouldn't work in an industry/role requiring C tools, and instead turn to some weird, novel, riddled-with-problems transpiler... I'd just learn C.

(P.S., bats[0] and shellcheck[1] address many problems noted in this thread.)

[0] https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core
[1] https://www.shellcheck.net/
Slowly but surely we got there mm by mm.

They don’t have centimeter worms in the metric world I guess?
The clamping force is distributed over an area: \sigma = F/A. Adding ring terminals increases the total clamped area, reducing the pressure seen at any point on the surface. Since increasing from 1 to 2 doubles A (assuming each has the same contact area) these surfaces see half the distributed force at every point.

It's easy to visualize if you replace the two rings with one enormous ring (and fastener, etc.) while F remains the same: obviously the distributed force at any point will be low.

The distributed force is crucial. Friction in real mechanical systems is non-linear. Conductors made of real materials vary in yield strength. A correctly engineered terminal must account for force, yield strength, area, vibration, dissimilar metals and other factors to prevent back off, gas ingress (thus corrosion,) high resistance etc. Real engineers don't do all the materials science involved here and no one would trust it if they tried: they rely on published standards, authored in blood.

Stacking ring terminals torpedoes all that: what was (relatively) simple with one ring becomes unanalyzed and prone to failure when stacked.
Not directly related to the central thesis, but it's annoying how Marcus promotes the narrative of OpenAI thriving on theft of IP ... and then, every time he wants to quote someone, he posts a screenshot instead of linking the source.
For female readers, the title might have a very different meaning.
No. OP is a dangerous fool. These standards are important.
Lower cost living areas are the most car dependent. Not really something you can avoid forever.
Well that’s rather lovely.
Kodak was probably a chemical company first with a depth of chemical knowledge (a bulk of the development of photography was the design of film chemicals).

Fujifilm, Kodak’s later main competitor, was in the same boat and they just leaned into chemicals more.

Fujifilm survived and then went back to photography and now makes instant photography film again. They also make digital cameras that have a decent following.

Kodak could have probably done the same. They were probably right to to not invest in digital, but they were probably wrong to not invest in chemicals, their actual main strength.
> It's minimalism gone to seed.

That's a fine way to frame it.

In this horticultural metaphor, I sure hope we'll come to germinate a new and healthy UX maximalism, but so far, with rare exceptions few and far between, I'm not seeing it.

Even Wikipedia, long a bastion of the good old ugly, went ahead and introduced a hamburger menu, replaced the old global sidebar with the article's TOC (collapsed by default with "generous" spacing), and replaced the old right-hand TOC with...whitespace.
for what it is worth, I think the breaking and entering case is distinct from attractive nuisance, which is much more common.
Its more a glue a state falling apart together with external opposition kitsunagi approach. Taiwan wirhout tsmc is less valuable, same as hong kong is less valuable once owned by the ccp.

Finally there is a level of people you integrate who know how flimsy dictatorships are that a dictatorship cant survive.
Microplastics found in blood clots, linked to higher heart attack, stroke risk
Nah, too many fanboys thinking their CPU testing is actually using LLMs.

They will say things like "Its a GPU inside a CPU". No that is the marketers telling you about integrated GPUs.

There is a huge divide between CPU and GPU people. GPU people are doing application. CPU people are... happy that they got anything to run.
Yeah I think there is some desire for bstr to come into std. But... it's like... tricky. We're steadily adding "string-like" methods to `&[u8]`, but for example, we still lack substring search on `&[u8]`. And lots of other things too. And there are things to consider like the fact that std has this elaborate `Pattern` abstraction (which is itself unstable, but still permits ergonomic polymorphic use of routines that are generic over it). Does that also need to get moved to `&[u8]`? And then there are things like `FromStr` that std implements for lots of types like integers and floating point. So to use those parsing routines, you need to UTF-8 validate to `&str` first. And finally, another nice point about bstr is its `BString` and `BStr` types, which serve as a "target" for trait impls that don't necessarily make sense on a generic `Vec<T>` and `&[T]`. Which is maybe fine for a crate, but it's kind of a clunky solution to the problem.

I think if `&str` was conventionally UTF-8, then a lot of this bifurcation and pain wouldn't exist. Because you could just zero-cost convert a `&[u8]` to a `&str` in safe Rust without any hitch. And then you get every method available on `&str` for free given a `&[u8]`.
To flesh this out, the root notes of C and A minor are not that close in the circle of fifths, but the chords sound similar because they share 2 notes (C is spelled C, E, G, and A minor is spelled A, C, E). A common device in major keys is to take a part played over the "1" chord (C in this case) and play it again, or some close variation, over the chord 2 steps down (A minor in this case) to get a "kind of the same, but sadder" version of the same part.
I'd love to know more about what he says which is now untrue. Could you give specific examples of false claims? Thanks.
This is my argument every time a European talks about the lack of American international travel. They poke at us like we're unwilling to listen to logic, but they themselves are unwilling to listen to logic about logistics of navigation of physical land masses. Even if an American traveled from the center of the country to a coastal part, there's still massive oceans separating from either side that must be logistically dealt with. From Europe, once could get to a lot of Asia without ever getting their feet wet. Those ocean borders act not only as security moats, but also as cultural moats. This is just too outside the everyday experience for them, that it just seems to not compute.

For whatever reason, non-Americas just are not willing to accept that as any kind of explanation. The expense of traversing those oceans to get somewhere else is large in both time and money when both are limited.
In the case of Fury Road it was observable before the movie even came out - the very first trailer they released used rough cuts of shots before much of the VFX had been finished.

2014 Comic-Con trailer: https://i.imgur.com/WFUxzgl.png

2015 release trailer: https://i.imgur.com/I9cWFGj.png
> motel (hotel that you motor to)

When I was a child, I remember seeing some such accommodations calling themselves "motor hotels" or "motor lodges".
give him a break, he's at least 3 pivots in on what criticism of OAI he actually wants to stick with - it must be hard to keep them all straight
> Or would they prefer to automate the flow as a background, asynchronous task?

Definitely want to use it for automation. When writing bindings for a large library it's helpful to have a script that picks several files as implementation examples then has Copilot write the rest by i.e. looping over library headers.
Version controlled config was why I started using it too!
Fire Drills and Phishing Tests