skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A prostitute is not a companion, not a replacement for a partner.

While the AI sexbot in question would simulate your ideal partner for you i.e. not just satisfy your sexual desires but also other emotional needs normally satisfied by a partner.
But many chatgpt hallucinations are catastrophically wrong. For example when querying for things related to advanced scientific subjects in physics and medicine for starters from my own experience.

I really want to give this a pass but the worst thing is that you can't really see where it turns from correct to incorrect, like you would usually pick up with a human teacher or peer when you start to get a feeling they really don't know what they're talking about. ChatGPT will gladly keep hallucinating references and reasonings that sound superficially plausible until you look them up, because that's what it's trained to output..

If they could just find a way to cut it off when it starts to become too unsure, it would be a big improvement.
> could easily just reissue a new letsencrypt cert

This would be visible in certificate transparency logs. MITM with the certificate they already have would be impossible to observe unless you had access to the client that was being attacked.
Not sure about them, but usually you would let LLM execute code to calculate it.
I (a Brit) used to listen to this pretty much religiously in the Nic Harcourt days.
Kid3 has been my go-to for a long time, but lately I've been using Strawberry[1] as my all-in-one music player, organizer, and tagger.

It has a built-in tag editor with MusicBrainz support and will auto-organize files. My only complaint with that is that it leaves behind old folders and files. e.g. If I have a few directories of MP3/Flac/whatever downloads with cover scans, it'll happily use the tags to organize the way I like it* but if there are "extra" files they stay put and have to be cleaned up manually.

But it's really a proper Swiss Army Chainsaw for doing everything in one application.

* Proper directory structure is "Artist/(YYYY) Album Name/NN-Song Title.[mp3|aac|flac]"

[1] https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ -- a fork of Clementine, which was a fork of Amarok.
Got the same vibes when reading their comment, basically self identifying as "the one" without admitting it.

The funny thing is that if someone has been doing IT for 40 years, I'd expect them to be generally aware that they might be good at big picture stuff but less so on minute things, as technology, philosophies and approaches change every few years but the general concepts stay the same.
There's a big number of things you can search for, but it's a finite number. There are certainly people interested in curating resources for their specific niche in exchange for curated resources in other niches, across the entire internet. Perhaps through a social web of trust. We need a new search engine resistant to sybil attacks. One that takes the social aspect of searching—connecting you with the relevant experts—into account.
> The other search engines that produce More results just pad those results with noise.

Yeah, that's been an increasing problem.. Google has been especially bad with this for a while now.

When I tried to search for something where I wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, I could only change my query so many times until it stopped being what I wanted.
Well, a stint working for one of the top-quality companies in the world taught me to develop a fairly thick skin. The Japanese are not gentle, when criticizing each other, and I had the honor to be considered worthy of Japanese-level evaluation.

But be that as it may, I don’t “harsh out” on people; especially in public venues. I may think "garbage," but I'm much more likely to say "this won't fit into the framework in that form." It’s my experience that many of today’s folks get very nasty (and personal), when confronted with even mild rebuke. I can understand why Torvalds goes nuclear, although I won’t go there, myself (I consider it unprofessional).

I remember once, denying a patch (SVN), because the "fix" would have addressed the submitter's particular issue, but also would have broken the functionality for, literally, hundreds of others. I told them that it was a good idea, but I couldn't implement it, as provided, because of that, and suggested that we figure out some changes.

The response was a long, public excoriation, complete with genealogical evaluations of my ancestry, back to the Pliocene.

I decided that, even though they had a point, and we probably could have figured out how to give them what they wanted, after some give-and-take, it wasn't really possible, because of their attitude. I did end up applying part of their request; just not the part that broke it for everyone else (I did credit them in the comments). I blocked them, and we have never worked together since.

I remember a post here, some time back, where a fairly talented young chap, was complaining about not being made a core Linux Kernel contributor, simply because he submitted a good PR.

If we want to be above-average, then we need to be willing to put ourselves into positions, where we will get criticized; and, quite frequently, the ones doing the criticism are far from gentle. It's been my experience that folks at the top of their game, frequently fail to accomodate those that are not at their level. They aren't always right, but they are often worth listening to, anyway, and we don't do ourselves any favors, by reacting badly.

There is definitely something to be said for earning our stripes.
> I've never looked something up in an encyclopedia

Does that include Wikipedia? I mean, the problem with encyclopedias is that they were small (despite physically taking up entire bookcases). I didn't use them much either, even back in prehistoric times when the internet wasn't invented. They tended to disappoint by giving a crappy, superficial overview of something that was only vaguely similar to the thing you wanted to know about.

But I use wikipedia instead of doing an internet search a lot of the time. Or sometimes archive.org, for things probably in books. Cut out the middleman, go directly to where you know the information is.
Scored 1x dunk-on-apple points for this feature:
U2's latest album automatically added to your library
Google´s new AI search tool tells users to jump off a bridge and eat glue
Coding Standards for Unreal Engine
Most dystopias have some very small percentage of the population for which it's a utopia.

I'm sure some of the people designing and building such dystopias like to imagine they'll belong to that small utopian part of it and disregard any impact to anyone else.
They made a serious mistake in battery cooling, let's hope they rectify this because 1st generation leaf owners will attest to how burned they felt as early adopters: maximum battery replacement cost, minimum range.
Knowing the future is the ultimate superpower.
The Mahdi is too humble to admit he is the Mahdi!
Whatever the oldest age you could set on ICQ, I did and dialed it back a few days to make it believable. They had a directory you could sort by age and I was in third or fourth place. At 18 I was getting “are you really 102?” messages all the time. 90s girls were surprisingly eager to send nudes as I quickly learned. I miss it.
After reading the directives, if people see a ML application that blocks the EU, they should be concerned about the intentionality of the application, and its use as a consumer.

On the other hand, if they leave free a market spot as big as the EU, others who comply with the directives will go for it, which may progressively eat the market to the non-EU compliant by the same reasons.
I don't think you ever have to have innovated or developed anything significant to take issue with a major consumer product losing some utility - I don't know if you used Twitter ten years ago, but it was pretty sad to see the site slowly downgrade year by year, every new feature making it less functional and more addictive, fueling toxicity, becoming a black hole of individuals' attention. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the people put up more of a fight whenever some new stupid feature was rolled out, or a useful feature taken away to make the whole thing just a little more like a slot machine. (Hmmm... maybe Elon Musk should buy Google, so people will finally start complaining en Masse.)

As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.
Our strategy is to take a well-known, battle-tested model as a base, train it, and then hopefully one day release the fine-tuned model on HuggingFace.

Other than that, fine-tunes don't really matter for us because not many people are rushing to beat the top models on (say) Georgian POS tagging or Urdu sentiment analysis.

As long as the model can turn language into a reasonable vector, we're happy with it.
I don't know what this "woods" or "hiking" stuff is about, but the scariest moment in Elite Dangerous is when you're far, faaar out of the human bubble, in deep, remote space... and, against all odds (the game is literally astronomical in scale), you pick up another player on your radar. You're lonely, so the encounter is exciting. And shocking. And mortifying. Out here, there's no system security. There's no repair facilities. You might be carrying months of exploration data. If they want to kill you, you're screwed. It's all the best and worst emotions all at once. :D
I would absolutely hate working in an environment where I had to wait for someone to write the css for me before I could ship code I wrote.

> These are all distinct specialities and web dev teams should be composed of cross-functional specialists.

I completely disagree and also thankfully this will never happen because it's completely impractical.
Likely there's a Calibre plugin to convert to Kindle's format. Kobo also supports .epub out of the box, but the software really works best with their .kepub format. There's a Calibre plugin which automatically converts .epub into .kepub when sending to the device.
Honestly I see a ton more ads on YouTube than search as I use Kagi but I can't avoid YouTube. I'm sure they have other future revenue streams for ad placement.
Sometimes I’ll read something like this and feel too depressed to even get out of bed in the morning :(
Users have no allegiance to google and this 25 years of trust he reckons google has is ephemeral.

I've stopped using google search entirely in favour of Phind and OpenAI.

>There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now.

Given that Bing beat them to the punch I'd say they're already late
It's a lossy comparison but the whole point is a consumer is generating a parasocial relationship, partially physical but also partially emotional.

There's a reason I explicitly called out Japan and Thailand, as host/hostess bars are normalized in society there, and are used for the emotional needs aspect.

All you wrote is a weird screed in favor of eugenics.
I think the “full stack” trend is harmful.

Yes it sounds nice in theory but there’s so many things to learn both in front and back end parts that I’m yet to meet a true “full stack web dev” even if they all claim to be.

Yes a guy who’s done backend all his career can write some basic HTML and CSS and some JS. And some frontend guy can write a simple server side code that writes and reads from a datastore. But they’re not “full stack” in my eyes, there had to be some balance in terms of knowledge in both areas; 60-40 would be ok, but 90-10 is not.

When I joined the company I work for over a decade ago there were backend guys doing frontend; yes they delivered something but frontend quality was poor. Now it’s the opposite, frontend guys doing backend (and of course they don’t want to deal with SQL so NOSQL it is); same thing.

Nothing beats a frontend and a backend dev (or multiple) working in tandem, IMO.
The article doesn't refer to capitalism. What in the article are you identifying as references to capitalism?
> Framework skills are perishable, but are easily just as complicated as the foundation layers of the web platform and it takes just as much – if not more – effort to keep them up to date.

That's so true. For my own projects I try to not use any framework at all (or sometimes still use Backbone, which is entirely deprecated but simple, and that I know well enough).

But of course, as an employee many times you don't have a choice. I was recently part of an Angular team (Angular 2). That was one of my most unpleasant experiences. Angular seems to revel in complexity for complexity's sake. And it's often not needed at all. In that case it was used for displaying information that lives server side and is constantly updated there (live inventory). Why would they need a big client for that?
There is more to it than that. Most humans are hardwired to be social and sexual beings, to relate to other people on an emotional level. This drive is so strong that without AI we anthropomorphize inanimate objects and see faces where they don't exist. AI-driven software is going to be designed to exploit those evolutionary imperatives to a degree never before possible, to manipulate and gaslight people with the skill and simulated emotion of a pure sociopath.
Still, if you use GPT-4 it gives you 60% of accuracy in predicting if it's going to go up and down, which is considerably better than median human forecasters. Stop being so dismissive and start reading the numbers.
I've been switching to Lemmy.

It's like Reddit but not owned by a public corp.

Reddit still has more users but Lemmy is more like old school distributed web, not just an ad product pushed by coked out MBA accountants.
I love that in our current moment if you will, that Luddism has been reduced to a binary, with zero nuance whatsoever. Either you are FOR every introduction of technology, every automation, every convenience, every new product regardless of it's demonstrated, documented deleterious effects, or you're an extremist boomer who refuses to learn email. There's no in-between at all.

I recall a time when a popular joke amongst tech people was that a tech enthusiast was someone who had every new smart home accessory and every new gadget and used them all, and a tech engineer was someone who had nothing more advanced in his house than a laser printer and he kept a gun in the same room in case it ever made a noise he didn't recognize.

I guess we're just more enthusiastic than we used to be. I like my smart switches, but I don't like the notion of all human knowledge being only accessible to me through the filter of a word generator. If that makes me a Luddite, then Luddite I am.
There’s more to life than web dev. Backends for instance.
That's irrelevant. According to Midler v. Ford:

"We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."

Ford having multiple ads would not have changed the determination.
Google keeps phishing ad after being reported
Yesterday I almost installed a download from a phishing site if it hadn’t been for Chrome to block the download and mark it as suspicious.

I wanted to download PostgreSQL on my mac. I googled "install postgresql" and then click on the official PostgreSQL site. I was undecided about whether to install it via Homebrew or by downloading the app itself. I closed the tab and then I decided to download the PostgreSQL app. I quickly typed 'download postgres' and I clicked without looking on the first Google result. Again, I clicked download without looking, assuming it was the official site. Then Chrome warned me that the download was suspicious.

When I checked the website url, it was posfgresql.com instead of postgresql.com...
I was in shock...
I knew about phishing ads on Google, but I didn’t think it would happen to me.

I reported the ad to Google and the domain to Cloudflare (many phishing sites route through Cloudflare, likely because of the ease of setting up HTTPS).

Today, I received a response from Google stating:

Dear Alexandru,

We’re writing to let you know that we reviewed your report (ID 9-7817000036510).

Here's what we found

We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies, which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem.

I was in shock again. How is this possible to promote phishing ads and not even remove them after being reported? It is that hard to check the url redirect?

I checked the advertiser's page and all their ads are phishing urls...

Here's the advertiser's link:

https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR10215658740934246401
It read like a ban to me. Other than age restrictions, which vary wildy, it doesn't seem like alcohol regulations have done anything to prevent unhealthy use.
> There's so much work an opportunities.

Many of them suck though. I get hired as a troubleshooter usually: that makes the most and it’s nice, get to see many companies etc. I work with people who are hired for frontend, backend etc; a month or so in, they will be asked things like ‘so devops, is that something you can do?’ Etc. And that is if it’s not in the actual job offer; ‘frontend expert wanted with 4000 years experience in everything’. I usually leave after 3-6 months as I ask a lot of money, but I have been asked to advice and help on Windows upgrades, printer emergencies and more.
IMO the biggest risk is that big tech will be the only ones allowed to do AI in a future regulatory regime, leaving smaller players out of the wealth making opportunity, and leaving society with a low diversity of options. And that regulatory capture is enabled ironically by people like Tegmark, who are pushing for restricting everyone with bureaucratic nightmares.
Very nice application of grug brain https://grugbrain.dev/

> given choice between complexity or one on one against t-rex, grug take t-rex: at least grug see t-rex
Phase changes and grokking make me nervious... It seems once you reach a certain threshold of training, you can continually "phase-change" and generate these emergent capabilities. This does not bode well for alignment.
I don't think anyone there would directly share it, especially on a site this public where you can't delete your comments.

But here's some of the ones on the web: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
For me, having an encyclopedia at home was a huge help with my studies and even finding out what I wanted to do/be later in life. This was 40+ years ago and I also had or had access to a lot of other books but never found them disappointing at all.
I doubt that Sam Altman is evil and I think you overestimate the power of billionaires.

Remember what happened to Jack Ma? A billionaire who was once the richest man in China? The moment he dared to challenge the Communist Party he was quickly dealt with. Or Chodorkowski? The Russian billionaire who dared to challenge Putin?

Worry about the regimes which are all about the will to power. First and foremost the CCP regime in China. They will develop every technology to the fullest, without any moral restrains, if it gives them more power.
I think you're slightly missing the point. Sexbots aren't ideal companions, they are psychologically crippling. Like eating a diet of only candy that looks like vegetables and protein, or injecting heroin.

Humans aren't having children only because they are an accidental byproduct of sex. The lack abortion use, even where available, proves that.
As a backend guy I uhh.. have long been of the opinion that web dev was always on the slippery slope of deskilling.

I remember working on a project where I was lone backend guy doing data storage/retrieval/aggregation/caching/entitelement/etc all behind a discoverable API that fed the UI everything it needed in a handful of calls.

Meanwhile the web dev guy took 6 weeks of iteration to create a date selector that wasn't awful.

Felt like they were too busy getting stuck gluing together frameworks they didn't understand and thus couldn't integrate well, and not simply writing a little code.

When he finally got it working, it was still awful. You had to select start date, start time, end date, end time.. and if you didn't proceed in the prescribed order the other selector boxes would reset and go wonky, lol.
From my perspective, the issue isn't with AI but with UI - Google is promoting these as "answers", pushing them to the top of their results and giving no indication that the results might ever be inaccurate.

Google has been pushing to "answer questions" over return web sources since at least 2010 (when their public messaging changed), so that is nothing new. But it is a seismic, human difference between aggregated results from trusted web sources and reformatted comments from Reddit posts.

AI is great for targetted tasks and even for general web usage, with caveats. I would love to see something like an accuracy/trust score associated with the results or at a minimum a beta flag with a "hide results like this" option.

These are all basic UI procedures any reasonable person would make, but Google has been riding high on hubris for a while now (zero human support, just see the Google Cloud issue on the frontpage...) and this won't change until the stock starts getting slammed, which seems imminent.
Cool. I didn’t mean it that way, but if you wish to perceive it as such, it’s a free country.
Hey! I don’t think it would be a few million. If someone offered me a few million then yes I would sell.

(solidaffiliate.com and AnalyticsWP.com are the two active projects)
Aside from the apples-to-oranges claim that a chatbots teaches you more than a search engine, it's extremely unlikely that AI will remain ad-free. Ads seem to be at a local minimum of the information economy and I don't see how chatbots would be immune to it.
I could almost believe you were making your argument in good faith until,

>Add electric baseboards as a backup for sub -5F temps and you can cover 100% of the country with electricity.

Now that is nonsense. They don't work in Minneapolis. Which brings us back full circle to the topic at hand: this "ex-googler" heat pump does nothing to improve on the operations or universality of heat pumps. It just makes them look aesthetically pleasing and that's worthless.

I'm not anti-heat-pump. I just wish they'd be developed into a truly universal solution.
You write this as if that is substantially different from common epistemology of the first page of links.

I’m not an llm advocate but responses like this bring to mind the “no wireless. Less storage than a nomad. Lame” reaction to the iPod.
A honest question. Could someone tell why is CSS getting more and more complex (other than Google and Co. want to protect their browser's market share and hold control of it)?
I wish I could say it started with Walmart and their drive to push down costs from suppliers. But I now believe that they just took advantage of a situation that was already in the making. The drive to cut corners in every aspect of manufacturing in the name of profits has made every possible thing disposable.

I just inherited an early '70s stereo receiver from my dad. When I opened it up, I was shocked to see the cover was walnut and not plastic. It just goes to show that as product quality degrades, our expectations degrade along with it.