skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The post here recommends using Intel's RDSEED, which is ironically trusted far less than /dev/urandom by most people who have a secret to keep or a process to protect.

What? If security is a special consideration for some form of data, why would someone choose a non-physical noise source over a hardware-based noise source?
There's a little bit of an interesting facet of this, which is that it depends on how you're defining patriarchal societies - if you're looking at what is explicitly encoded into the legal systems, it's hard to argue that, as of today, the US or really most of modern world qualifies, and similarly if you're looking at who holds power, while the gender skew is still towards males, a disinterested observer from the future would not observe a society in which power is either exclusively or as a rule held by men. I'm not sure the legal structures around gender in China or India (if we're talking about percentages of the global population), though, although at least for India one could argue Indira Gandhi might have been the most powerful person in India since the empire.

Culturally is a different question, obviously.
Now I cannot get that picture out of my head. A crowd full of bodybuilders in tight shorts and all on Viagra doing workouts.

Each to his own I guess..
> "if it classifies successfully, it must be conditioned on latents about truth"

Yes, this is a truism. Successful classification does not depend on latents being about truth.

However, successfully classifying between text intended to be read as either:

- deceptive or honest

- farcical or tautological

- sycophantic or sincere

- controversial or anodyne

does depend on latent representations being about truth (assuming no memorisation, data leakage, or spurious features)

If your position is that this is necessary but not sufficient to demonstrate such a dependence, or that reverse engineering the learned features is necessary for certainty, then I agree.

But I also think this is primarily a semantic disagreement. A representation can be "about something" without representing it in full generality.

So to be more concrete: "The representations produced by LLMs can be used to linearly classify implicit details about a text, and the LLM's representation of those implicit details condition the sampling of text from the LLM".
I wouldn't put myself in that position.

When the question is of the form "what do you think about the ethical implications of using AIs?" and the quick answer is "humans also make mistakes" I think the entire premise is on pretty shaky ground.
What transformers have taught us is that gobbling up the whole internet can get you pretty far, but it doesn't change the fundamentals. Hallucinations still are trivial [1] to elicit. On the other hand, transformers are a software breakthrough that made training on the whole internet even feasible. Other methods (RNNs and LSTMs) were simply too slow. Transformers are a new hammer for an internet-sized nail.

If I can make an analogy to chess engines, a type of AI so old that people don't call it AI anymore [2], if we had started out by applying transformers to available chess games, we would never be able to create an engine that could reliably beat a grandmaster. Predicting the next chess move based on some representation of the game and its relationship with previously-seen positions only gets you so far. Deep Mind tried [3] this.

One route forward, which doesn't require a fundamental breakthrough, would be synthetic data. To stick with chess, we could create huge synthetic datasets of a huge amount of chess games, and simply continue training as we were. However, this is very expensive, and can be tricky if the synthetic distribution isn't the same as the real one. And the end result is still going to require incredible computation power to use.

What an LLM really lacks is the ability to search. And search is really important [4]: without it you'll probably need orders of magnitude more data and orders of magnitude larger models. At a fundamental level, search means we don't just make a snap judgement about e.g. the likely next token, but, as Daniel Kahneman would say, "thinking slowly" about what to do/say next.

Assuming we will not have search is how you get projections like needing 100 GW power plants to supply dedicated training data centers. The human brain uses 12 watts. 100 GW is the energy requirements of all human brains on the planet. And yet, if we put all human brains on the planet together, our collective capabilities would be outclassed by a chess engine I can run on my phone.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.02061

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

[3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.04494

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceCg90Q9N6Y&t=1200s
Build RAG Applications Using Jina Embeddings v2 on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
That's a pretty short list given the length of the roman empire. Shorter than I expected honestly.
> No, you're not. There is no guarantee that your payout on a claim will be less than the value of the premiums you paid in at the time you make the claim.

With insurance it’s very difficult to get more than the market value out of the destroyed thing on payout. Even if you ignore premiums you’re usually just breaking even. This isn’t a law but it’s something insurance companies wised up to pretty quickly because the incentives get pretty attractive to commit insurance fraud when there is profit involved.
> The only way it could be passive like the article describes is if the developers don't know or otherwise don't consider the "right way" and go straight for the "fast way". I hope to never work on a team that operates like that.

I've been on teams like that and it's absentee management. There's two reasons: the management is technically inept or the execs and other stakeholders are taking up too much of their time. Sometimes it's both.

This creates a situation where either the most technically competent team member takes over responsibilities or the team just loses coherence.

Beyond that there's also often a severe lack of involvement from the broader organization where everything is siloed.

The quality of the dev team reflects the quality of the business. Implementation details are not so different from "operations" in other fields. Makes no sense we have such a terrible state of things in software at some places other than a lack of talent and residual people who should have retired or pivoted careers a long time ago.
You need at least nlog(n) bits for the same reason as regular shuffling. There are n! permutations and it therefore takes log(n!) bits to uniquely describe a shuffle. nlog(n) is the same as log(n^n) which is obviously greater than log(n!) (this is Stirling’s approximation).
Pseudoephedrine
> how often does the house lose?

Not often, but it does. See AIG
According to the internet, Al Einstein once wrote or said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.” Whether he said it or not, it is true. To my dismay, I understand a lot of what is being posted here, and I can assure you that at least half of the part I understand is confusion and dead-ends from the outset. You may say, "Yeah, but so-and-so released such-and-such software and made millions!" So what? Having a hit doesn't make a man infallible. People in this scene who are legit don't spend much time here. They are either too busy getting shit done, or too busy enjoying early retirement.
All I know for certain is there's no dementia in my pants.
One does beg the question of where awareness comes from. I can't see that any particular physical arrangement could explain it. I mean, maybe a fundamental particle or fundamentally different form of matter could be found to be what plays the role in producing consciousness, but then what would cause that matter to have or produce awareness? Perhaps that matter has behavior we can measure, but how would it produce conscious awareness? Would it be possible to understand?

As far as I can see all you can explain is that its there, but can't understand why, which suggests its transcendent over what we can see and measure

And what we can see in terms of the physical world is not proof that there isn't more to existence

Take the plant that gains sustenance from the sun and the earth, yet the fact that it has no faculties of perception that allows it to understand those processes is not proof that they don't exist

So perhaps we are like plants in a greater universe? Again, NDE's (near death experiences) are also suggestive of this

And also looking at how Baha'i taught equality of women / men, and the need for independent investigation of truth, and dedicating one's self to helping the poor etc... coming from 19th century Persia that was pretty barbaric and fanatical where women couldn't even show their faces in public much less get educated, and where plundering each other and favoritism was literally the primary engine for their economy... kinda shows that perhaps there is insight in the original Baha'i teachers
Often this goes in the “other direction”; many corporate software projects start with a large team and, based on success or shifting business priorities, can go between Modernize —> Invest —> Maintain —> Goodbye in unexpected time frames. It is very difficult to optimize for those future states, especially with go-live time pressure across many teams - abstraction is a strong tool for managing Conway, and those big frameworks do it well. Nobody wants to think their team won’t grow, we’re all building The Next Big Thing in our minds.
It is nice when one's heroes live up to the mind's picture of them.
Could be different for different folks
Hi beckler,

Is the team still hiring for the Security Engineer role?

About me

Cybersecurity professional with 2+ years of experience in web application security, incident response, and managing security alerts in a 24x7 SOC. Adept at identifying and remediating critical OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, deploying DAST and SAST techniques, and utilizing FortiSIEM, Splunk, and the MITRE ATT&CK framework to enhance threat detection and streamline incident response.
This is how i figured out NO would help my heart. Eating cereal colored with beet powder. If i understand the magic happens when it combines with saliva. So chewing beets might help.
I agree it's hard to say. It seems more likely we'll plateau, along the lines of Pareto Principle. At the very least we still need a few more data points on this curve to give a prediction. But it's worth thinking about.
See also: https://brr.fyi/posts/south-pole-electrical-infrastructure
The first one is just a combination of some computer modeling guessing at possibly useful existing drugs and a look at the existing patient data showing that people who were on these seemed to have Alzheimer's less. It's very clear that it's just an initial step that doesn't actually show there's a benefit.

The second is more of that same basic kind of research, but weighing in the opposite direction: it showed no association with Alzheimer's for people with a specific other condition who got these drugs vs. ones with the same condition that didn't (also they did some cell culture testing outside the body that didn't show any effect/improvement).

This new one is an actual double-blind study giving people the drug. Equally important, it's not claiming an effect on Alzheimer's, but vascular dementia, a different form of dementia that's directly related to blood flow and therefore to Viagra's known effects. Of course it's still just really a marker for future research on if this is broadly useful.
> It's pretty amazing how much labor was done by women that was crucial to society. Beer, medicine, weaving, braiding, bowstringing, raising livestock, etc.

There is a very rich strain of feminist literature on this very point!

> He explains to her that topologically, the knot she is making can be made six other ways. She goes "yes, the such-and-such and such-and-such knot. Do you crochet?".

This is fantastic.

I'll have to take a look at "1000 Years of Women's work." Another one to add to the reading list, just for sheer pique, is "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke - https://bookshop.org/p/books/bitch-on-the-female-of-the-spec...
Wall Street Job Moves Spur Billion-Dollar Trade Secrets Fights
Ideally a LLM would have every text in existence in its training set, right? I doubt we’re anywhere near that now.
Agreed. This paper is pretty much pointless.

Its extremely implausible, putting it generously, that such fine-tuned structures could even form. They mention at the end "this paper does not attempt to tackle the problem of structure formation" but that feels like a colossal understatement.

I've studied physics myself, and I understand that sometimes people toy around with implausible theories solely for the sake of it but .... it seems like these peoples brainpower could be much better spent elsewhere.
I've worked in an embedded Linux system that was a greenfield project. We needed a library that was written in a certain language, but we also wanted Python for the rest because getting the logic right with a client that changed his mind often was top priority and the data crunching was minimal.

So we ended up using protobufs over a local MQTT broker and adopted a macro-service architecture. This suited the project very well because it had a handful of obvious distinct parts and we took full advantage of Conway's law by making each devs work the part where their strengths and skills were maximized.

We made a few mistakes along the way but learned from them. Most of them relating to inter-service asynchronous programming. This article put words on concepts we learned through trial and errors, especially queries disguised as events.
Or worse “hey you have a reward” but it doesn’t show up in the UI for three minutes. Twitter used to do this to me all the time.
I think this paper is an effect of there being not much to do in theoretical physics these days. I mean, there's plenty of work that can be done, but I think it was Feynman who said all physics that could ever affect humanity was described by the 1963. Since the Higgs was discovered in 2012, we've covered pretty much everything in the Standard Model. I'm sure there's some intellectually interesting problems left to solve, but it's hard to believe they'll affect us.

Nevertheless, societies still need physicists, and those physicists, by the nature of how incredibly challenging the "industrial" problems are (e.g. designing next generation fusion weapons), need challenging problems. Indeed, they crave them. And so you're sort of stuck solving progressively more esoteric and even contrived problems.
Maybe they forgot what they said before?
First off, congrats! Cool paper!
Q: did you measure the correlation between CodeAid use and test scores?
When educational youtube videos took off, people liked them a lot, but turns out people weren't really retaining very much information. You'd think this wouldn't be the case for CodeAid, but it's important to check
Mozilla silently bans 2 anti-state-censorship add-ons in Russia
I'm the author of "Runet Censorship Bypass".
We help Russians to circumvent state censorship while with some
tricks the extension may also be used to bypass private discrimination or sanctions-based censorship.

We received no notifications about this restriction.
Waiting for the official statement or just any comment from Mozilla.
There are many off label uses. Pulmonary Hypertension for one.
If you want to "lurk" somewhere to learn about game development, download you a copy of the free (and open source) Godot game engine and lurk in one of their discussion / live chat channels on Discord or Telegram. Always folks there pointing out worthwhile tips, tricks, and beginner through expert level knowledge about the topic.
All depends how you feel about observational studies vs randomized trials. Key word = "feel".
"...are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

Seriously, lesser-schooled folks don't realize the extent to which evolution took tiny variations over an extremely long time to achieve physical flight. The way it arose differently in pterosaurs, birds and bats is fascinating.

I think younger children are capable of understanding more about genetics than we often suppose. More of these concepts should be taught at younger ages.
Different strokes for different folks?
> Would you be opposed to replacing human tutors then?

Yes.

> If your answer is yes, (in some flavor of "protecting and helping the jobs of those who teach), I would argue your ethics are focused on the wrong group. Teaching is for students to learn, not for teachers to have jobs.

OK. But your framing here projects upon me the idea that I'm solely concerned about replacing jobs, in order for your argument to succeed. (Though again, that is the cold-rationalist AI zeitgeist[0]: why should people have jobs when an AI can do it?)

It elides the possibility that it is inherently better to learn from a real person, who has invested time and effort into teaching you. What is the point of higher education in particular if you are not learning, at some point, from people who are directly adjacent to cutting edge thinking?

> We don't have said technology yet, but it's reasonable to think we can get close. If there's a good chance to improve how well students can learn, I don't think "teachers don't appreciate it" is a good reason not to do it.

Well then. I can't argue with this, if you think it's OK to take humanity out of teaching. I think — perhaps feel — you are so wrong that I can barely even string the words together to explain. And that is an unbridgeable divide.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/opena... or https://archive.ph/AL81B

'In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”'
There's also https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise which is open source. AutoFocus seems like a proprietary clone in beta that will eventually become paid.
Viagra is prn, you should not take it 3x/day. Cialis is a daily dose.
I wish they had gone more into depth about standardizing for mass and fat-free mass and presented data in units /kg/day (instead of just /day). They say they did standardize, but at a glance I didn't see much more detail. Obese people have massively elevated RMR compared to non-obese people (when reported as kg / day).

They still had retained an impressive amount of weight loss after 6 years (compared to most free-living participants in dietary intervention trials), and RMR is of course going to be proportional to your body mass.
> IMHO you get the same with Java (8+) and everything running atop the JVM, Golang and some other programming languages.

I mean... kind of? Java and Go both have reflection, sure. Creating types at runtime (e.g. for mocking) also kind of exists ... kind of. Though it's very hacky in both languages.

The REPL story is also much better in dynamic languages. I've seen production incidents get investigated, diagnosed and resolved in minutes, that would've taken hours at other companies.

Though of course with great power comes great responsibility. I've seen some abhorrent misuses of reflection, and I've seen issues caused by overuse of prod REPLs. It's all a tradeoff at the end of the day.

> Code navigation/auto complete is IMHO much inferior in dynamic languages

With type annotations, I've never had any problems with autocomplete or code navigation in Python (e.g. PyCharm, Python extensions for vscode, etc). Ruby either.

Without type annotations, you're gonna have a hard time.
AI engineer/AI researcher, e.g. in three years we will see AI do what maybe Andrej Karpathy does today? A complete 100% replacement that we can clone an infinite number of times? That seems hard to believe. But yes, if true then extrapolating what happens after that seems like science fiction. We have no tools to even imagine what that looks like.

EDIT: The graph also shows GPT-4 as "smart high schooler". I don't think that's really true. GPT-4 can perform some tasks at the level of a high schooler but is definitely not a smart high schooler in the more general sense. A smart high schooler can get a driver's license and drive a car around better than any AI in existence. And that's just one thing they can do.
Is there any specific reason you choose to use it? Do you trust the OS not to have any back doors?
> the matchmaker shuffles the queue to avoid the same players being matched together repeatedly

This is actually something I hate about multiplayer games with matchmaking nowadays. I made the majority of my childhood friends only because we stayed on the same server and played together for hours on end. I don't think it's a stretch to say that a key reason for why we play multiplayer rather than single player games is to socialize. This has become increasingly more difficult when you just get a new set of people every 10-30 minutes.
React won worst front end framework that somehow got popular and brainwashed people into creating a mess to double down on.
PFAS specifically

> New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania have the most highly contaminated drinking water systems, according to the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) interactive map.

> Newsweek analysis showed there are around 556 in New Jersey, 439 in Massachusetts, 263 in California, 202 in New Hampshire, and 125 in Pennsylvania.

Saved you a click.
Might be a 2:1 but we also have to take into account the level of evidence each study provides.
There’s a Forbes article that cites the FDIC stating that you are only covered if you open a bank account in your name - which isn’t the case here for all these users. And they further warned to not use these neobanks for every day banking.

Since synapse isn’t a bank, technically there hasn’t been a bank failure so fdic doesn’t step in.

There’s over 128BB in the fdic fund so we can easily bail these customers out. But they should figure out if it’s fraud or what not.
That would be cool - maybe a simple 20/20 vision would be a great next step after hearing
I am lucky enough to have a good programming gig which pays the bills so writing is and will always be a side gig. None of my friends or family are aware I am an author (though I occasionally drop a hint) and I have no interest in the marketing or social media side of making it a business so there is no disappointment and great satisfaction in the achievement.

I hope I did not make it sound like I was disappointed; I certainly am not, I got to play with 2048-bit graphene processors, zero-point energy and wormholes for a short while, and I am happily writing my second novel as we speak.
But $2.3M is the justice.

(Unless it should be more, and then that DoJ will sue for the full amount.)

Are you suggesting we ought to let overpaid lawyers battle it out, then get fined $2.3M?
Apple plays “catch up” by quietly hunkering down for a few years and then suddenly leapfrogging everyone else.
Propagandists are using AI too–and companies need to be open about it
LOL I thought you were referring to the Bread Fork, which made *me* go mmmmmmmm.
I was talking about the regime used in the study. If you read the article you'll find that
Loosely speaking, it's a structure that can't be continuously transformed away. For example, consider a (frictionless, non-dissipative etc.) fluid flowing in a circle around a given point: a vortex. Since this has net angular momentum, and a fluid moving uniformly in one direction doesn't, it's impossible for the vortex to dissipate. We can move it around, or split it up, or fuse it with other vortices, but we can't just smooth it out.