skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: 100% open-source voice assistant – as a HAL9000
It started in 2018 with my first 3D printer and some openscad designs - just something that looks like a HAL9000 (and had a controlled red LED for the visuals) - it ended up being a full software-project...that hasn't ended yet. But: it is at a (quality-)point at which I am OK with putting it up on stage.

My project goals: A digital voice-assistant that is...
- actually usable (response times, error rates, ...)
- performs everything on-device ("look ma, no cloud")
- is entirely Free/Libre Open-Source-Software
- is as-easy-as-possible to build

I consider all four goals to be accomplished even at this ~90% stage of the project.

If you just want to get some quick impressions, check out the "Demos" (video-)page in the github wiki (prominently linked in the README in the github repo). If you want to spend some more time on this, it's probably easiest to watch my presentation at Hackaday Europe from two months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqJCU8FRMQg&t=14761s
You'll literally be talking to some form of AI for each interaction on the net at some point in the future.
"Unilaterally violated territorial sovereignty" is probably a more objective way to put it.

Although there's the argument the Kurds invited us into Iraq... (before we abandoned them for the 3rd time)
From what I can gather it depends, but could be a simple Softmax-based layer[1] or just argmax[2].

There was also a recent post[3] about a model where they used a cross-attention layer to let the expert selection be more context aware.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06538

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02813

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675577
Pulling people out of retirement to build more of the same short range missile the Army bought in the 80’s is not how the gap is closed. Where are the new systems? Does anyone build things anymore?
Technically it was in the fan disc, and not a turbine blade. And while there was a defect, a big part of the problem was that an inspector most likely missed a crack during overhaul. The crack was present at a previous inspection, which they knew because there some fluorescent penetrant remaining in the defect.

I worked in a turbine engine component repair shop for 8 years. We had an NDT inspector fall asleep a lot in his booth and miss cracks. I’m pretty sure they ended up firing him. But maybe not as quick as they should have.
How would one finetune for "idea synergy"?
something something chesterton's fence
Lies, Damn Lies, and Data Science
You inevitably have to do multiple encodes. An H.264 encode as the "plays anywhere" option and an AV1 encode as the "less bandwidth or better image quality at the same bandwidth" option.

YouTube does H.264, VP9, and AV1 video encodes with AAC and Opus audio encodes.

This video for example has encodes of all those options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArmDp-zijuc

You can watch it in multiple resolutions and formats from 4K in AV1 down to 144p in H.264.
> The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the inadequate consideration given to human factors limitations 1n the inspection and quality control procedures used by United Airlines' engine overhaul facility which resulted in the failure to detect a fatigue crack originating from a previously undetected metallurgical defect located in a critical area of the stage 1 fan disk that was manufactured by General Electric Aircraft Engines.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Thank you so much, this really closed the gaps in my understanding of what really happened.
This talks about one of my pet peeves with a lot of 3D software: they don't use Arcball[1] interface for rotation.

Autodesk products do (3DSmax, Maya), but Blender and OpenSCAD don't. And when I worked at Roblox, I couldn't convince the PM to let me implement it, because the users got by with whatever was there — and if they wanted more, they could use something else (...which they did, and Roblox stock reflected that in 2022).

Arcball is based on quaternions[2] (using exp for interpolation).

It's the only interface with these properties:

1. Any rotation can be accomplished with a single drag

2. No gimbal locks

3. Tracing a closed loop with a sequence of drags results in coming back to where you started

Once you formalize this, you can prove it mathematically (ultimately, this comes from unit quaternions giving a 2-cover of SO(3) in the same way unit complex numbers giving exactly the rotations of a circle).

For anyone interested, here is my reference implementation of Quaternions / Arcball that you can play with on the page:

https://romankogan.net/math/arcball_js/index.html

The code is very-commented Java (Processing library, running in JavaScript by the magic of ProcessingJS).

It's one way you can feel the fancy math.

Your hands and body will understand quaternions before your brain does.

If you ever work on 3D software, please use this, and thanks in advance <3

[1] Arcball: http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs171/assignments/hw3/hw3-not...

[2] Quaternions for rotations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotati...

[3] Arcball in Processing: https://romankogan.net/math/arcball_js/index.html
Google maps? Google search?
I used it to create a fantasy console running in the browser (https://github.com/shazz/ZigMachine) which is more constrained due to the webassembly limitations but I would definitely use it for native dev.
I've recently matured to the point where all applications are made of 2 things, search and security. The rest is just things added on top. If you cant find it it isn't worth having.
you are making the mistake of thinking that 'search' means database search, like google or sqlite, but 'search' in the ai context means tree search, like a* or tabu search. the spaces that tree search searches are things like all possible chess games, not all chess games ever played, which is a smaller space by a factor much greater than the number of atoms in the universe
I am very thankful that you introduced me to the type of people who just took down the highly respected folks at Stanford. I did not realize that this is what had happened.

I now realize that I am on the wrong side of a previous wave function collapse, and I might be living in the dumbest possible branch of the multiverse.

Here is what I just learned about brownstone.org:

> Newly obtained internal emails from the Brownstone Institute reveal support for child labor and underage cigarette smoking at the COVID-19 misinformation dark money group.

https://www.importantcontext.news/p/leaked-brownstone-instit...

Please watch this deeply whackadoo insanity, from Jeffery Tucker, the founder of Brownstone:

> schoolsucksproject.com

> If you could earn money from the ages of 12 to 16...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUQpfalF-iM

This has been up on the School Sucks YT channel for 11 years. It was not taken down. Jeffery Tucker still believes in this.

My take is that the guy is nuts and I will never trust anything that he ever promotes. After watching this, do you?
> (They are still expensive, so I recommend second-hand purchases. Many libraries still refresh their volumes every few years, putting older ones up on eBay).

If you actually can't afford one, I wholeheartedly endorse this. But if you can afford a new set, please buy a new set. They only still print them because a minimum number of people buy them new. I can't imagine this will last forever, so, support World Book.

https://www.worldbook.com/encyclopedias.aspx

The previous years set is often discounted, if the full price is a little too much for you.
How I navigate in Japan:

1. Get the hotel / company / restaurant's business card with the address in kanji

2. Show that to your taxi driver

3. Taxi driver ignores the address and puts the phone number in their GPS

or

1. Take the train/metro to the approximate location

2. Your destination will be noted in the signage by exit number

Step (2) is especially fun at Shinjuku, at which point you call your friend who says they'll meet you at the South Gate. Which one though?
I read much about this project. It seems like really smart people, really good work.

They have some weird feeling marketing? I don't know what to think about it, maybe its a "technical people doing marketing" problem?

I also don't know how to trust the "shared/cooperative multiparty cryptography" thing? I don't know of anyone else doing the same thing, some underlying feeling I have that it can't really work can it?
Encyclopedias that have built their reputation on being written by subject matter experts should hopefully be free of AI text.
From googling, Snow Don departed HK on 2013-06-22 and the US State Department cancelled his US passport on 2013-06-23.
> the direction you’re facing

I'm fine with these, but it's like unspoken rule to never indicate the true directions, even if it's gigantic 2m x 2m billboard.
This strikes me as Lesswrong style pontificating.
why do you put an extra zero in front of the year?
Very unfortunate name for a company that wanted to expand in Brazil. In Portuguese, Koo is homophonous with the word for a**hole, so it's not a surprise it didn't stick.

Not to say it wasn't humorous though. People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.
Are you using it for trading?
Would be interesting if resulting bursts of gamma radiation increase the entropy of global DNA causing higher population of new virus candidates.
"Debilitating a Generation": Long Covid May Eventually Affect Most Americans
I keep dotfiles and configuration scripts on GitHub. Use a password manager for any kind of authentication. An MDM takes care of application installation, apart from some of my own idiosyncratic needs, which I install for myself - they're all OS or direct-download, so no appstore involved. Dropbox handles files.

I got to stress-test this a few weeks ago, when I stupidly left my laptop at my dad's house, three-ish hours away. It took me far less time to get myself set up and fully-productive on another machine than it would have to even make the one-way drive.

My only real frustration so far: installing all of the SublimeText packages I've come to rely on. Once I get my my other laptop back they (or at least their configs) are going into git as well.
All this needs is a big "definitely not the feds THIS TIME" sign :P

https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/the-fbi-created-its-own-...
https://archive.is/fbFV9
Without affecting weather patterns?
What sort of measurement setup and process are you running to compare these and properly control your experiments?
slight step aside - do people at notion realize, their own custom keyboard shortcuts break the habits built on the web.

cmd + p -- bring up their own custom dialog. instead of printing the page as one would expect
!! is poison but what is priceless in the JVM is attaching an exception handler to each thread so exceptions don’t fall off ignored, mostly you don’t want to catch exceptions if you can but instead use finally as much as possible to get the state right on both happy and sad paths, if you must rethrow use a rethrower function that handles InterruptedExeptions!
If I saw any lawyer or doctor using it in a professional context then I would stop using their services immediately. The amount of bad information it hallucinates is not something that's worth paying someone to be a middleman doing data entry on. Their job is meant to be knowing this stuff, if they need an LLM as a crutch then they're not good at their job.
> Clearview opted to offer a stake instead of cash payments since the company could "go bankrupt before the case made it to trial," according to the NYT.

Yes, that’s the intended effect. I would like this company’s head metaphorically on a pike next to the road into town as a warning to others.
Apple's AI will erode human creativity one prompt at a time
So, the bump stocks were banned, and the law abiding citizens who owned bump stocks then complied with the ATF order to destroy the bump stocks. How do they get their loss of property resolved?
In 2020. when they removed the reserve requirement, it enabled something close to unlimited money creation. Someone deposits $100 in the bank. The bank lends the $100. The $100 is deposited back into the banking system. The bank (or another) lends the $100 again and it's deposited again. This could go on forever (and mostly does). An actual $100 bill once deposited could become inflated to be $1 million in "deposits" easily across the banking system. With a 10% reserve requirement, banks could only create $1000 in loans.

This is just one of many tools the Fed uses to inflate away your money.

I don't know what the answer is, but I doubt that the Fed is a benevolent organization doing the best they can for the American people.
i'm surprised you think we will harness so little computation. the universe's lifetime is many orders of magnitude longer than 13 billion years, and especially the 4.5 billion years of earth's own history, and the universe is much larger than earth's biosphere, most of which probably has not been exploring the space of possible computations very efficiently
It seems there is a fundamental information theory aspect to this that would probably save us all a lot of trouble if we would just embrace it.

The #1 canary for me: Why does training an LLM require so much data that we are concerned we might run out of it?

The clear lack of generalization and/or internal world modeling is what is really in the way of a self-bootstrapping AGI/ASI. You can certainly try to emulate a world model with clever prompting (here's what you did last, heres your objective, etc.), but this seems seriously deficient to me based upon my testing so far.
Bollocks. Absurdly inefficient. Where's all this energy and money for it going to come from?
How many megatons of copper would be needed to be mined to make that happen? What would the line loseses look like? where on the planet are there six to eight tine zones next to each other with equal enough demand to make the excess build out work?There is a good reason we dont have this yet
That makes all of us.
Actually, I was mistaken. The line numbers aren't even numbers, so much as digit pairs, given how one-digit labels take the first digit.

And the "DO" command takes a group number, runs each line within the group, then returns after the end of the group. So each group can effectively act as a subroutine. (In this particular game, this can be seen in groups 6 and 9.)
If you practice too little, you'll screw up wording, miss important points, and sound nervous. If you practice too much, you'll sound robotic like you're reading a script word for word, which doesn't sound good unless you're an actor who's practiced reading scripts while still sounding natural. You have to find where the balance in the middle is, which depends on yourself, your content, and your audience.
What kind of field / chat interactions does your chatbot do, if you can share? Apart from Klarna I haven't heard any other success in this regard...
so true - I held on to Excel 2003 until 2018 at which point it really just didn't work anymore on Win10

As someone various colleagues have urged to compete at modeloff years ago, it's really just something one would do if they enjoy it, anyone smart/experienced enough to do modeloff/etc. would also know it's not a good value proposition in terms of winnings/expected value/etc.

Also, anyone who writes a formula like "=SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)" is a bit suspect imo

from chatgpt:

Here's a practical example to illustrate:

Assume cell C3 contains the string "A:B:c".

Removing colons results in "ABc".
Converting to lowercase results in "abc".
Extracting ASCII codes of "a", "b", and "c" gives 97, 98, and 99, respectively.
Summing these values gives 97 + 98 + 99 = 294.
So, the formula SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””)))))) for the string "A:B:c" results in 294.
that's interesting; are you building a sort of 'digital twin' of the world it's explored, so that it can dream about exploring it in ways that are too slow or dangerous to explore in reality?
My experience from an increasingly long time ago was that starting at around age 24 (which was ~5 years ago for you), I got worse at staying up late or going with little sleep. I would try to pull all nighters for work, and it would absolutely kill me, whereas younger than that I could do it.
> What is it with SWE's and binary thinking?

That looks like a binary split (All SWEs think in binary) therefore you are a SWE and should answer your own question.
I just see embracing the lag and wishing for death as a normal part of the VS code experience
As well characterized by Slim Dusty and Ernie Constance in "Just can't miss it, mate" https://archive.org/details/ka-you-just-cant-miss-it-mate
At the UNH-IOL in 2004 the departments all had their own /24 subnets. We were warring with one of them over their winning where we got lunch, and so we put a line of javascript in the webmail html client that would open the print page dialogue box 0.5% of the time if the request came from that subnet. Oh, I misread 'had' as 'put'.
People should not get over this (but probably will). There was an uproar (decades ago) about GMail "reading all your email". This was overblown, but Microsoft building the infrastructure to view a history of everything on your screen is much much worse. There's a lot more private things that get displayed on a screen (and of course all of your email would be a subset) that no one has a right to see.
You’re making two invalid assumptions that break down when dealing with a functional paradigm.

1. You don’t have breakpoints, your code doesn’t run. Your code is the thing that configures the code that runs. Your code is descriptive.

2. Nothing unexpected can happen. That’s the point of pure functions and a strong type system. You don’t need to know the exact values that flow through at runtime to know that your code functions as written.

Granted, if you write code that doesn’t make sense then it will produce* results that don’t make sense. If you don’t fully understand the problem you’re trying to solve no programming paradigm can save you from creating bugs.
> and with an easy criteria for heavy early pruning (once a branch becomes losing, not much point continuing it)

This confuses me. Positions that seem like they could be losing (but haven’t lost yet) could become winning if you search deep enough.
yeah, that was completely out of left field as compared with =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) which, while convoluted and a terrible formula/method to use when sharing spreadsheets with others, is far more nuanced
This is what I do when I was an undergrad. I used alumni startup products and went their meetups so I got to know the founders in person.
If this was released out of the blue (and not on by default) after maybe windows 7 era: sure microsoft is just putting some new untested feature out in the wild.

But Microsoft has made loud clear reputation destroying moves in the last few years by putting ads into the BASE OPERATING SYSTEM. And also forcing online account linking into the BASE OPERATING SYSTEM. They are yelling out into the world that they can no longer be trusted because they dont understand what an operating system is suppose to be anymore. What kind of deep trust is required to be that layer in a computer.
Any advice, I need more of a forcing function to actually get my resume through the first pass. Too many startups under 1yr definitely has fucked me.
I didn't read the comment. I wrote the comment.

Water Fast means only drinking water. Standard terminology. You can verify that with a quick Google search.

1 - 2 month survival estimate is for an ordinary person. If you're obese then you can survive up to a year without food.

For an ordinary person in reasonably good health, a 24 hour water fast only provides health benefits. Up to 3 days of water fasting is beneficial. I wouldn't recommend any longer than that.

The more frequently you fast, the easier it gets. Your body adapts to burning stored fat as fuel and the hormonal hunger triggers become less severe. I've reached the stage where 24 hours is easy.
Heh! I just mean it seems like a cool thing to have the ability to turn on when you want to use it, because you want it, not as an opt-out feature.
So well known that it's just openly published:

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

e.g.:

> In tempering steel or iron, apply too much heat, so that the resulting bars and ingots are of poor quality.

> Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts.

> Misfile essential documents.
For shorter distances you use landmarks, like known chains of convenience stores or restaurants. For longer distances, larger roads do have route numbers (county route 69, national route 3, etc).
I’m not sure !! is poison. I see it the same as rust’s .unwrap() calls.
He’s a time traveler from 38056
“Creating a human-level intelligence artificially is easy: just copy what happens in nature. We already have this technology, and we call it IVF.”

What’s the point of this statement? You know that IVF has nothing to do with artificial intelligence (as in intelligent machines). Did you just want to sound smart?
Show HN: Open-Source Library to Integrate with Multiple LLMs
Hey HN, I've built a few microapps over the last year or so integrating with different LLMs. I've found they're each good for their own unique use cases.

The process of trying and testing each model for each purpose has been a little painful, particularly when working in the context of a microapp.

To simplify this, I started working on a library so I can easily switch prompts between LLMs and assess the return values.

I've now published this as an open source project called Quolo.

Keen to keep building this publicly, but would like some feedback before I go too far down the rabbit hole.

I appreciate my experience is not everyone's. Would love your feedback on the idea, and any ideas you have about what it could turn into over time.

I'm really excited to keep evolving this.

Thank you.
> According to the company, the biggest burdens on operators are hearing abusive language and being trapped in long conversations with customers who will not get off the line—such as when making persistent requests for apologies.

> Nakatani said, “AI is good at handling complaints and can do so for long hours, but what angry customers want is for a human to apologize to them.”

An aside: is this something people really call up call centers for, for an apology? If I'm calling it's because I need something, or something is wrong and I need it fixed. I don't need a random call center person to apologize on behalf of a corporation. I just need my thing resolved.
What's your context for averaging multiple rotations?

Averages are something that you can do with sums, where order of composition doesn't matter.

Rotations don't commute, so the concept of average as we understand it doesn't normally apply to them.

If you're holding a phone: rotate the screen away from you 180° (so you'd be seeing the back), then clockwise 90° relative to the ground (around vertical axis).

Your camera will be facing your left.

Now hold the phone normally, and do the same rotations in the opposite order. Your camera will now be facing your right.

Question: where should the camera be facing in the "average" of these two rotations?

There's no single answer — it depends on what you need from the average.
Specifically, Victorian-era bakers.
How does an LLM provide ‘deep emotional connection’ - ever?

That’s like saying porn provides sex.

Total non-sequitor.
why does it feel so much worse when you don't drag from the middle and instead from the e.g right side? It feels stuck and sometimes it snaps. If the point from which rotations are calculated changes then I think it should somehow be visually obvious what this means for the rotation and be shown on the screen
I got tired of that shit years ago and switched to PS5 for gaming and Debian for everything else.