skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deal of the internet has always been: send me what you want and I’ll render it however I want. This includes feeding it into AI bots now. I don’t love being on the same side as these “AI” snakeoil salesmen, but they are following the rules of the road.

Robots.txt is just a voluntary thing. We’re going to see more and more of the internet shut off by technical means instead, which is a bummer. But on the bright side it might kill off the ad based model. Silver linings and all that.
> It's in the title of TFA: they're being dishonest about who they are. PerplexityBot seems to understand that robots.txt is addressed to it.

First, I'm ignoring the output of Perplexity. I have no reason to believe that they gave the LLM any knowledge about its internal operations, it's just riffing off of what OP is saying.

Second, PerplexityBot is the user agent that they use when crawling and indexing. They never claimed to use that user agent for ad hoc HTTP requests (which are notably not the same as crawling).

Third, I disagree that anyone has an obligation to be honest in their User-Agent. Have you ever looked at Chrome's user agent? They're spoofing just about everyone, as is every browser. Crawlers should respect robots.txt, but I'd be totally content if we just got rid of the User-Agent string entirely.
> profit is the only thing that matters

Can an activity be sustainable without involving profit or depending on profitable activities? Please share examples.

When transactions are informed and voluntary and there is profit in a competitive market that is wealth created. The key is to have these conditions and many real economies struggle with this because the payback for corruption and monopoly is high.
You can cp the image to a block device and it will work
When I ask older family members where they were or how they reacted when some important event happened, they usually say something like, busy with real life. Being glued to the news is a modern phenomenon, it’s not the required state of being
That's a historical question. At this time, most if not all the bots were either search engines or archival. The name was even "RobotsNotWanted.txt" at the beginning but made "robots.txt" for simplicity. To give another example, Internet Archive stopped respecting it a couple of years ago, and they discuss this point (crawlers vs other bots) here [1].

[1] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Townscaper seems to be one of the few games Steam games on Mac that works with a PS5 controller.

Nice game, I love the trick of making floating buildings.
>Travel bloggers and vloggers

I've no doubt some good ones exist, but my instinct is to ignore every word this industry says because it's paid placement and our world is run by advertisers.
This still doesn’t address the duck curve aspect, or overnight usage. It is fundamentally impossible to use PV to directly power your wonderful super efficient heat pump to warm your home at night. You will still need batteries!
It’s a huge deal to me as an iPhone user- half my friends and family have android phones and I can’t see the videos, photos, and emojis they send me and vice versa.

I’m not sure how this would not be a big problem for any iPhone user? Do you not send or receive messages?
At about a gram a day.
"Her grandmother was a “hyperosmic,” and she [was] teaching [Joy] to distinguish the scent of the petals from the scent of the leaves from the scent of the pistils and stamens."

One might wonder how much of Joy's hyperosmia was acquired by continuous training, similar to how a sommelier learns to discern flavours.
yeah, Apple has previously said that green means not encrypted, implying that blue is encrypted. Where the SMS aspect of green is just happenstance, and again only implying that the blue of imessage is just happenstance too.

I think this phrasing is just a CYA thing. But I’m definitely curious.
This was not lost on me.

Another movie from that same era I enjoy is The Pentagon Wars about the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It’s one of the better made for TV movies I can remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=steA_PZPkc8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
None but not by choice, it's illegal in my country.
Second response after having thought about your question a bit longer, re: "any code base"

First, VCS is a generic term. Saving files to a backup is a VCS, zipping and sending files via email is a VCS.

What kinds of system use VCS as their underpinnings? Build systems, disaster recovery systems, deployment systems, more... Without VCS, you can't have those systems, and which code bases require none of those systems?

Perhaps we are talking mostly demo projects, small ad-hoc scripts. Would you posit other examples perhaps? My perspective is that it is so trivially damn easy to get a VCS set up locally, even a distributed one, that while - yes - you can live without it - in what cases should you really be living without it? Particularly in light of all the downstream dependencies of a VCS.

Maybe we disagree on the ROI of VCS? I can understand someone not building a CI/CD pipeline because it is kinda costly and maybe won't be used enough to justify it. With Git (VCS), there was a time period where I was new to it and was corrupting files left and right. Getting past that, the cost to set up & use is absurdly tiny, my daily workflow has had no issues for years now. Perhaps there is a difference in perspective there? That you view the ongoing cost to be really large? So much so, that a cat walking across your keyboard is so rare and the daily pain so large, that you have a different perspective on the ROI?
Well, one solution to this would be to include bulk Markov chain generated content on your website. I'm starting to think the only way to fight back against AI scraping, is to make ourselves as unappealing a target as possible. If you get 100 poisoned articles for every 1 good article, you become a waste of resources to scrape.

Simply use a Google Noindex directory on the pages you're using as an attack vector so they don't pollute your website's footprint.
That was my immediate reaction as well. Some part of my brain just prefers building walkways. In the web version, you apparently have to keep adding walkways above a building to convert it to a walkway. Super satisfying.

https://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/#IzhCuIQmN6b832-HkACCzF...
Ok.

And source control is an extremely important general concept in the space.

The idea of "programming with other people, on the same codebase" is not some industry specific skill set.

It is important and useful for a thing that involves programming and working with other people.
Presumably the issue is more the travel guides/Time Out/Tripadvisor type websites.

They make money by you reading their stuff, not by you actually spending money in the place.
“The National Transportation Safety Board isn’t aware of the Southwest incident, a spokesperson said. The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association declined to comment.”

This is insane to me. It looks like Southwest was trying to keep this quiet. But this is an incident that all airlines could learn from.
"every group chat just gets created in an OS-agnostic app if one of the users has an Android"

This is probably true for you and me (actually everyone I know regardless of platform uses Signal) but not for many people it seems.
I honestly can’t tell if this is sarcastic.
Same, except I read him say he prefers pineapple on pizza. After reading that, I knew Odin was no good.
Where can I find the original interview in Spanish?
He had it coming.

The funniest part is that everyone has a different reason to think that.
It is not meant to compete with feature rich programs.

Keydogger does one thing and it does it well. If you think it's misbehaving in any way, it's so small you can read and confirm that behaviour.
Patron of the Tarts (2019)
It's not that it has no value, it's that there is no established way (other than ad revenue) to charge users for that content. The fact that google is able to monetize ad revenue at least as well as, and probably better than, almost any other entity on the internet, means that big-G is perfectly positioned to cut out the creator -- until the content goes stale, anyway.
>(i.e. by playing chess you will mostly improve your chess ELO)

I have found it to help with strategy, especially multi-round strategy. This is useful in business and other areas of life, not just chess ELO.
15mg edible before bed to get to me to sleep, plus some occasional smoking either in social settings or out of boredom.
Around 2 grams a day, smoked.
Presumably because Apple is all about privacy and this RCS won’t be encrypted and so any law enforcement or hackers may get access I like with SMS, I imagine they don’t want to boast about it.
The generated power will be dissipated through the panel as heat, AFAIK.

Which means that in winter, probably nothing, because it's cold, but on a hot summer day with peak sun, the heat might start damaging the cells. How much exactly you'd have to look at studies.

My guess is the output will permanently degrade by a few % per year if the panel is not connected. Might go down to 80% way quicker than normal (25-yr)
How fixed is all this? It would be nice if we could scroll through time.
I like the way Kotlin did it: fun. Gives a nice alignement of four with the space. And functional programming can be fun.
I like this notion (that any ancient past actions must carry facts of subsequent actions) better than trying to push a "right to be forgotten."
Shouldn’t this be the NTSB’s job?
How MOSS Works
AI has always had a terms problem, perhaps because cognitive science does too—one of the key features of the controversial but highly entertaining “Origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” book was defining what consciousness isn’t.

My mom was diagnosed 3 years ago with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and had rapidly progressed. One thing I’ve noticed is how much projection is involved in intelligence appraisal—it’s hard to not get worked up by someone with a dementia because in your mind it’s a version of you and your capabilities looking back at you—the actual state of the dementia brain is entirely ineffable to the perceiver.

I wonder whether a similar effect tends to occur when people appraise LLMs. LLMs can sound human enough for our automatic projection to occur, and so actually evaluating the intelligence of the machine becomes extremely non trivial because the theory of mind of the observer is projected into the LLM.

I’m largely with Yann LeCun here: I think that current LLMs are magical but their key power is extremely effective fuzzy search. They will find a pragmatic way into software, but barring more innovations will not be a revolution—though more innovations are on the horizon.

The traditional strong AI characteristics are theory of mind and consciousness, so ultimately defining those terms very narrowly and precisely is going to be important. I doubt we’ll see a clear and unambiguous leap to AGI, it will be gradual, so agreeing on terms is going to become more important. It does feel like real metacognition is a clear attribute of intelligence in my eyes.
If the brain actually used language to represent ideas in use, we should have succeeded in finding its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar. Instead it seems more like language is a kind of lossy compression we keep reinventing for ideas, to export them from a brain in some tangible way and get them into another (even in the future).
A Publishing Haven for the Offbeat and Irreverent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/arts/devolver-digital-vid...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240614134558/https://www.nytim...

https://archive.is/dLkZF
Btw this is called "contrapositive"
I recommend running bot motels and seeding with canary links / tokens. When you find out what they're interested in, tailor the poison to the insect.
1) If your blog posts are private, why are they on publicly accessible websites? Why not put it behind a paywall of some sort?

2) How many novels have bibliographies? How many musicians cite their influences? Citing sources is all well and good in academic papers, but there’s a point at which it just becomes infeasible. The more transformative the work, the harder it is to cite inspiration.

3) What about libraries? Should they be licensing every book they have in their collections? Should the people who check the books out have to pay royalties to learn from them?
With all the ad blockers out there, which functionally demonetize content sites, why isn’t there an ad equivalent to robots.txt that says “don’t display this site if ads are blocked”?

So many good comments from several points of view in this thread and the thing I can’t square is the same person championing ad blockers and condemning agents like Perplexity.
Great response, thanks for taking the time to write out the numbers!

What do you think about the implications for transportation, maintenance and land use? I have zero idea what the balance of those costs would be for a grid-scale solar farm, but ostensibly going from let’s say 20% to 21% efficiency means you need 5% less land, weight to transport from factory to site, fewer panels to inspect/build/install, fewer to purchase, etc.

I’m sure someone else has a better idea how much it would affect the LCOE than I do!
When I scroll out, I would expect to reach a point close to Earth or our solar system, but somehow, I look at a sphere from the outside.
This comment reveals a strange level of cognitive dissonance, because it sounds like you’re describing in others what you actually see in yourself. Someone who does have a list of things they reject wholesale, and refuses to find common ground with others who believe in any of those things. And then you conclude by assuming you’re the only one who thinks critically about this stuff.

For what it’s worth, you do say some relatable things and appear to be figuring out your own mind. Which we can all relate to
I hate to be that guy, but the name is neither helpful to explain what it does nor will it facilitate adoption. Show me the IT department that won't freak out when it sees a process called "keylogger".

Apart from that I will certainly try it because I have a use for a lightweight one job - one tool kind of typing helper. I guess others will too.
> spoofing an agent seems in dubious territory.

Just to clarify, Perplexity is not spoofing a user agent, they're legitimately using a headless Chrome to fetch the page.

The author just misunderstood their docs [0]: when they say that "you can identify our web crawler by its user agent", they're talking about the crawler, not the browser they use for ad hoc requests. As you note, crawling is different.

[0] https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/perplexitybot
To clarify on the physiologically impossible bit:

1. The NTSB and FAA both found repeatedly, as have pretty much every other study - academic or otherwise - that people _cannot_ focus on watching a task without actually being involved in or doing the task. Any "self driving" model that requires the non-operator to be engaged in driving is simply not humanly possible. So the only reason for that stated rule is the manufacturers know these systems are unsafe, but nonetheless want to make themselves not be liable for their faulty products.

2. The only other "vehicle completely controls itself" system in practice is aircraft flight, where the pilots are necessarily engaged in all critical times, and for the remainder of the time all the systems either give sufficient warning before anything goes wrong (e.g. when autopilot disengages on an aircraft you have a substantial amount of time before impact - not the <=2s warning Tesla gives people), or the aircraft systems have specific extremely heavily trained signals for which there is only a single action and no immediate requirement to regain situational awareness (stall, acas, tcas, etc). The time these "self driving" systems provide to regain situational awareness and then take appropriate action is less than what we expect of trained pilots, yet it's somehow acceptable for random drivers.

The current self driving "you are expected to be in charge of the vehicle at all times" is entirely liability shifting: manufacturers are knowingly selling unsafe products, especially Tesla, they are lying about the capabilities of those products, and then they are saying it is the drivers fault when they fail.

What manufacturers are doing is no different from a manufacturer selling a car with an ABS system that fails, and saying "the driver is responsible for identifying ABS has failed and pumping the brakes if it does, if they fail to do so we do not accept liability for the ABS failing"
April 16th, 2012
Silicon Valley was my dream destination when I was a child
> can I stop an LLM from training itself on my data? This should be possible and Perplexity should absolutely make it easy to block them from training.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but why? And what do you mean by “your data” here?
Fair enough. I'm sure you are aware that you can safeguard against careless or accidental long-running transactions by setting "statement_timeout". Of course that wouldn't allow intentional long-running transactions, so not really a fix (although you could have a replica with a longer "statement_timeout" for long queries against that). But I get what you are saying.
It's a box drawing character (U+2502) rather than a pipe. Pipes are typically drawn with fairly large gaps.
Six Simple Rules for Simplifying Everything
The only RCS clients that are in use support axlotol ratchet encryption. Apple could literally take the MIT licensed implementation that Matrix wrote and got audited and slap that into their RCS implementation if they cared to support this interoperable feature.
I think I'm over "C but better" as a language design premise. C is really good as a low level language. The control you give up over assembly is well chosen. The syntax is fine. You have to tell the compiler to now screw you which is crazy as a default but doesn't matter much in practice.

I've just spent a week doing ~ nothing other than writing C. It's been great. The language does exactly what you tell it to. Generating C to do things from tables of data is very easy. I especially like the zero context switching that comes from being able to remember the language. Python or C++ involve far too much looking up documentation.

It's the wrong tool for solving most problems but the right tool for telling a computer what to do.
There's more than one way to define what a bot is.

You can make a request by typing the url in chrome, or by asking an AI tool to do so. Both start from user intent, both heavily rely on complicated software to work.

It's fairly logical to assume that bots don't have an intent and users do. It's not the only available interpretation though.
Yeah, this is how institutions like the Sicilian mafia work. It’s framed as “organized crime” because we live in a state-oriented society where the state is actively trying to supplant the non-state system and assert its monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Of course, these institutions also change and adapt to competition with the state—for instance, when the state tries to break up the mafia using the literal prisoners dilemma, the mafia needs to invent and enforce the institution of “snitches get stitches”. More troubling is when pre-state mechanisms of dispute resolution can be end-run by disputants trying to enlist the state on their side. For instance, the notorious Hatfield/McCoy feud was exacerbated by various prominent members of one clan or the other getting themselves elected sheriff and abusing their power against the rival clan.
Many high performers have perfectionist tendencies
… and I have absolutely no obligation to provide any particular response to any particular client.

Parsing, rendering, and trusting that the payload is consistent from request to request is your problem. You can connect to my server, or not. I really don’t care. What you cannot do is dictate how my server responds to your request.
That's fair, it's not supposed to be a rebuttal of that :)...

Though now that you said it, I'm really thinking about the original statement.

Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?

I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but nothing is coming to mind right now :)...

Just thinking about the underlying statement and simplifying language down to symbolic expression. (I was originally going to say manipulation, but it doesn't feel like it quite fits...)
I think more people know what a keylogger is and are confused by that.
You can set the user agent without needing an actual window device running chrome
Corporate has asked you to find the differences between these two pictures.
In public middle school, I would have settled for not getting punched every day by muscular jock 8th grade bullies, and having toilet paper in the bathroom that hadn't been peed on. But apparently exotic requests like that were out of scope even in a mid-income sd.
Big News for Quantum Computing: First Scalable Platforms
You're missing the part where Perplexity still makes a request each time it's asked about the URL. You still get the traffic!
without looking at the code, I can guess that things like occlusion and visibility calculations are a lot harder when you are within a city than when you know the entire city is in the same direction relative to the camera.
> "Perfectionism" is just avoidance. You don't want to work on something because it won't be "good enough". The keep part there is: you dont want to work on something.

Everybody talking about perfectionism is trying to explain to you that this is not true. Perfectionists have anxiety about delivering things, and will often avoid extremely easy work in order to do harder things. I'd almost say that's the defining characteristic; you'll see a lot of things that are 95% completed, and instead of finishing and delivering, they'll switch to learning ancient Greek (edit: or add a bunch of "necessary" complications that balloon that 5% into infinity.)

Go through a perfectionist's projects, find one that's close to deliverable with a few finishing touches. They will try to keep you away from it (they may even pick a fight with you), they will hide it from you, they'll tell you it's terrible, they may try to destroy it, and if you manage to pry it away and finish it, they'll beg you to take their name off of it. They will do this to the point of emotional manipulation and open threats.

The avoidance of the task isn't the cause, it's the only symptom.

> Ignore all this superficial language. The heart of the behaviour is in what isnt being done; that's the truth of what's going on.

Perfectionism has absolutely fuck-all to do with the specific task. Perfectionists like working on things, which is why they're constantly doing it.
How Duolingo uses streaks and notifications to keep users coming back
I once worked for a company where their R&D team just acted as a middleman between the company and research organizations like universities and national labs. It worked well as the universities and national labs have funding for out-there stuff, but lack actual data and often a true understanding for how things work in industry. A lot of the companies in industry often don't have the resources (or priority) to do their own research, so sometimes both camps benefit.

You could probably add like 10 more categories to this if you include actual traditional engineering companies (e.g. mechanical engineering). I do a lot of simulations myself with real models and haven't done any super theoretical journal work yet.
Think of them like snowflakes
Is your employment at-will, then? If it is, you can be asked to leave for any reason as long as it is not a legally protected one (like discrimination). What does it mean to "fight" the termination?