skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The good faith answer is that they believed their own projections. This article mentions that the UN projections just somehow assumed everybody's fertility rates would decline and then kick into a mediocre but closer to sustainable level for a slow bleed. This topic has been a pet obsession of mine for years now because these data made no sense. Why would everybody's fertility rates suddenly trend to 1.69, as per the article's numbers? The more logical path has always seemed an ongoing extrapolation of current trends, and that leads to quite terrifying outcomes on very short timeframes. And as more people seem to realize that's where we're indeed headed, it's long since past time for a sharp 180 on this topic.

On top of incorrect projections, I also think most don't understand the math of how fertility rates affect populations. It's an exponential system, so extreme outcomes are entirely possible with rates that seem 'bad' but not that bad, like e.g. a fertility rate of 1. Such a fertility rate, if shared among an entire population, would result in an exponential 50% decline in your population per 20 years. And alongside that you get social chaos, screwed up age ratios, economic chaos, and more. All on an extremely rapid timeframe.

I think this is a self correcting problem, but it's likely far wiser to fix it before it starts fixing itself.
Aren't traditional styles of single family homes also far too expensive to build now for non-luxury-premium prices too though? I don't think it's special to 5-over-1.

(And indeed, most new construction single family homes are pretty disastrous too?)

I especially love the architecture of Chicago though, it is a delightful city to be in. Many parts of the city managed to have historical building booms at just the right times to leave us with some amazing infrastructure.

But yeah, the OP is talking a lot about how mid-rise density residential-over-retail is great for livable cities -- and I agree! Chicago demonstrates it. 2-5 stories of residential over a retail ground floor is great for neighborhood "main roads". That isn't the issue, the issue is that we just don't like cost-competitive new construction much, whatever the layout.
(Edit: Looks like the articles from Jacobin and New Statesman have been taken down.)

From the other thread:

https://jacobin.com/2024/06/noam-chomsky-obituary-media-theo...

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2024/06/the-noam-chomsky-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720876
In France consumers with below 36kVA grid connection can choose to pay state fixed prices, or they can choose various market offers, here is the official list of electricity providers:

https://www.enedis.fr/liste-des-fournisseurs-delectricite
I think the big reason they're so huge is they make it easy to onboard alllll your data, and incentivise you financially to stick with all their custom tooling and instrumentation. So the "quick wins" have a long tail of financial scaling. As your own scale grows, your DD costs grow. And so you do a few things that may entrench you further to drop your costs and the sunk cost fallacy helps corner you. You need your dashboards and alerts now that you're bigger, so you aren't thrilled about the prospect of rebuilding from scratch.

Anyway, I know this because I've been there at a former employer. We started off (and mostly stayed) otel at the base layers, but more and more had to move to proprietary DD collectors/agents for off-the-shelf system metrics (db, cloud, VMs, k8s, etc), because otherwise they were custom metrics and very very expensive.

So they're very very sticky. And the market loves a sticky + expensive vendor.
> Isn't it a bit wishful thinking to think that storage will come down in price and nuclear won't?

It's been true for 50 years, assuming it will be true for another decade or two is not wishful thinking.

> Beyond that, leaving out storage costs, what are the technologies that can cover the world's storage? And in what quantities?

Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.

> Because if I think of lithium, wouldn't it be an environmental disaster to extract and recycle all the materials involved?

No.

> In general, I don't understand why basically nuclear is to be replaced.

It's inevitable that the cheapest solution will win. Not the best, but the cheapest.
The very latest 2024 update (not yet on their website) is apparently a small increase, because they expect a slower rate of fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa.

(I think I read about this on the IIASA website.)

Time will tell.
Well most of the explanations I personally am interested in have a public and therefore high epistemic value. Since they are published and repeatable. Certain behavioral tests or self-report surveys on the other hand have lower value because of the private nature of what were intending to test. They still have some value though.

Private experiences may be very important for individuals and like I said elsewhere, free-will is certainly a useful idea in religious contexts. I do not believe this has any bearing on practical matters such as our ability to predict or understand the actions taken by any given system such as humans or computers.
Indeed, businesses can maximize profits by pushing the limits of customer tolerance. And I see that often now
> And how do you get lower business rents? There's a thing called supply-and-demand that might be helpful here.

It's part of it for sure, but there are lots of commercial vacancies that sit empty for years because landlords often keep storefronts vacant on purpose. It's a confluence of reasons and it depends on the locale -- sometimes there's a tax break if it's vacant, sometimes there's a tax increase if rent hits a certain threshold and the landlord wants even more to make up for the new tax, sometimes the mortgage is guaranteed by the rent price in some way and lowering the rent would cause the holder to pay back the difference immediately, etc.

There are tons of empty storefronts in NYC at the moment, for example, so more supply isn't really the issue here, often it's a web of really bad policy.

And I'm sure this is the place where people start saying Land Value Tax.
just because a VPN or exit node has been used before doesn't mean SMS is the best anti spam measure, I don't know what data you're operating on or what's better for that data, but it undermines the privacy aspect for an SMS prompt to ever be triggered
It will never cease to amaze me that he is the creator of Chomsky heirarchy of Grammars that I learned in university, and I can go to youtube to find him talking about how each American president would be guilty of violating the Geneva Convention.
Also what line N+1 does, please.
> Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

A history of the phrase, which was originally said in 1954 (seventy years ago):

> Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[4]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

It was never meant to be taken as $0:

For a long time water was paid for in a flat rate, and one could certainly envisage where electricity was the same: the power company would pick some kind of median/average to charge folks.. Of course most folks have metered water/sewage nowadays, and so metered electricity is less strange.
The paper is also on arXiv, which includes the TeX source. The experimental HTML view for this paper has automatic (internal) hyperlinks like hyperref: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09591

Edit: The TeX source has the `draft` option for hyperref that disabled hyperlinks in the produced pdf. External links to references aren't recoverable from the included main.bbl (probably because it was built with the `draft` option).
It's always possible to go back and fix streets. Amsterdam used to be a car-dominated hellscape not totally dissimilar from American cities, it just got to be more walk and bike-friendly through heavy street/road renovations over the decades.

> but the streets are too wide, not walkable enough

Right, but this is fixable. You can always go and reduce the car/parking lane space and make the sidewalk wider and/or add a bike lane.
None of them seem to be referencing any sources other than themselves, the Twittersphere, or each other.

Nor would I describe Jacobin or The New Statesman as reliable.
RIP to one of the greats.
No the main difference is looking at the problem from a new perspective, relating it to a large body of existing work in statistics (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain_Monte_Carlo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_gradient_Langevin_d...). Then they are able to use this new perspective to add several improvements that lead to significant quality improvements, clearly establishing the validity and utility of the new theoretical underpinnings. It's likely this will be massively influential in the direction of future research in the space.

The actual changes this led to are:

1) As you mentioned, they added noise. But notably, they state it was "designed carefully" to conform to the requirements of SGLD and they detail how they designed the noise.

2) They simplified the original operations of "move, split, clone, prune, and add" and their related heuristics, into a single operation type. They do so guided by existing knowledge about MCMC frameworks, leading to a simpler model with stronger theoretical underpinnings (huge win!).

3) Adjustments to how gaussians are added and pruned to better fit with the new model. This seems more like housekeeping rather than something novel in and of itself.
Possible Futures – Exploring Possible Tech Futures: AI, Ethics, and Humanity
When aggressive, deceitful behavior becomes normalized...
Nuclear is very poor for baseline requirements. Baseline requirements should be met by the cheapest source and more expensive sources should only be added as required to follow demand.
Try a different email address, that's what fixed it for me.
I had a friend recently tell me about how his excess power is put back into the grid and how he hopes our area sees negative rates eventually like this.

My cynical side was quick to point out that I would fire up my crypto miners if electricity was free for a few hours a day.
After talking to him more I realized we both had different take aways from the story of "the tragedy of the commons"
I lightened the conversation up by informing him he could do folding from home for a few hours to make sure his excess power went to a noble cause & thwart my zero sum approach.
RIP

Highly influential
Homeobox genes [0] are relevant when it comes to pretty high level "heads go on that end, butts go on that end" stuff.

There's also this parody video of Despacito [1] that may be, er, educationally amusing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk
The post "On Possible Futures" explores the intersection of AI development, ethical considerations, and their impact on society. It delves into speculative scenarios to provoke thought on how technological advancements may shape humanity's future.
The oil situation is not analogous. It's not like solar prices going negative are something that is difficult to predict, or the result of things like "black swan" geopolitical events. Once we build out enough solar we should be having negative prices literally every sunny day - of course, the hope is that enough storage comes online then to mop up that excess generation so prices don't go negative.
Because the price of electricity is (unfairly) based on gas price by EU regulations, imposed by Germany. One of the propositions of one party running for the next election is to renegotiate this so we can use our cheap electricity as the competitive advantage it is.
Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large part of the investment market is looking for the share price to increase or they aren't interested.

There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
Moritz Klein is a pretty great explainer of DIY electronics for synths. All his work with Erica Synths, including this breadboard, is such a welcome (and needed) addition, especially since the videos and manuals are all loaded with info and available to everyone, whether they've bought a DIY module from Erica or not. Props to both Moritz and Erica Synths for doing it like this.

As to this breadboard, there have been a few synth- (or even modular synth-) focused breadboards created over the years (such as the one Bastl/Casper released a few years back), but this seems like a particularly well-designed one. I quite like the modular interfacing section (with its adapter PCBs) near to bottom -- that's a nice way to handle adding more controls easily/modularly.
I spent 2 hours on Adobe customer support chat just this morning trying to decrease my company license count.
It was the 90s. I was probably in the ninth grade in a small, sleepy little town in the southernmost part of India called Quilon when Noam Chomsky and his wife showed up on a stage and talked about how life has to change culturally to be a developed nation and how linguistic skills should be at the forefront to succeed.

I was probably just 12 years old, but it profoundly impacted this little kid and was etched for the rest of my life.

Rest in peace, Mr. Chomsky. You've impacted more people than you can ever imagine.
How dangerous is it to walk there with your child to get them to school
:D thats some out of the box thinking
1 mile is a good amount of time to walk with a kid.

A better angle would be biking the kid to school, but it's possible/probable that the route isn't good for bikes.
New _electrons_? Oh wait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
Lynn Conway, Computing Pioneer and Transgender Advocate, Dies at 86
Yeah, it feels like I saw an example somewhere
My last role was Director of Ventures at a rising org out of Seattle. The work was rewarding and impactful, but as a non-profit I found myself spending less time working with founders and more time fundraising. It was very stressful as fundraising for a non-profit is neverending work.

I left for a manager role that saw me with a lower title, but never having to worry about fundraising ever again. I have less responsibility, a lower title, and more red tape, but my stress level and work/life balance made the move 100% worth it.
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/technology/lynn-conway-de...
Didn't you just describe how ever single wood-framed, concrete-foundation building is designed, regardless of whether it is a 5-over-1, a new-construction McMansion, or a 970's rambler?
Memory safe languages contain memory bugs as soon as eg you want them to be fast enough to implement a JIT.
rapjr9 - I commend you for using your talents to help the world instead of hurting it. From one human to another, thank you.
Let’s see how he talks himself out of that one.

Seriously, that man had a profound positive influence on my life in so many ways. What a loss. R.I.P.
Main discussion and anecdotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40648470
It's certainly a credible thesis that's being offering here, and yours is probably the best formulation I've heard of it.

Still, from my own brushings with folks in "professional circles" -- they tend to be pretty consistent about packaging assessments such as these with probabilistic labels (e.g. "likely", "highly likely" and so on). My main concern here is quick toggling to "known" or "near certain" status (or insinuations that "everyone in the IC believes this", which I am noting is not your intention here, but it did sound like it at first).

It's also just a general policy I like to follow with events out in the real, messy world. No matter good our "model" may sound (to our own ears) about what someone did or why, it's always entirely possible we're missing something basic -- not so much a piece of bombshell evidence, but about the broader human context; or that our analysis is simply flawed.

On top of that there's a significant tail risk that comes with putting too much stake in our models, especially when they get coupled together, and motivated reasoning inevitably starts to kick in.

On a finer-grained note (and to explain why I can't assign this narrative too high of a degree of likelihood): It's not automatically clear that the Russians could have traded Snowden in by now -- they may be asking too high of a price (since he's apparently way more valuable than anyone the US has in their trading deck), and since 2014 they may have been coupling it with their hopes that the US will decide to start being "reasonable" about the situation in Ukraine (and so his transfer would be coupled with a deal in regard to that situation), and so forth.

I also don't see how we know that "they already had all the files he had leaked", or that anything about his case has the potential to destroy the intelligence relationship (which has always found a way of surviving, despite all the bile and vitriol we see on the surface).

(This is all in regard to the "weak" version of this model, that Snowden acted independently but had to have broken once he got stuck in the Motherland and was forced to ask for asylum. The "strong" version in the sibling post -- which asserts that he must have been cooperating with his current hosts from the very start -- has just way too many plotholes, and is way too top-heavy in my view. Not to be dismissive, but I have to limit my time here, so that's all I can offer on it at the moment).
Well, consider this:

- The overall retraction rate is 4 in 10,000.

- Most researchers go their entire career without a retraction

- She now has 4.
> I think this is a self correcting problem,

My fear is the correction will involve rolling back women’s rights.
if you can read Italian "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[0] is a collection of monovocalic sonnets which tell or describe masterpieces of literature (the title would be something like "Shahrazad shall hang at dawn", for Arabian Nights).

Umberto Eco, which famously enjoyed this stuff, wrote the preface.

Ironically I learned of this book from an American, Douglas Hofstadter.

[0] https://www.semidinchiostro.com/prodotto/giuseppe-varaldo-al...
You can observe the effect even when there is only one particle moving at a time.
BigCodeBench: The Next Generation of HumanEval
"""
BigCodeBench contains 1,140 function-level tasks to challenge LLMs to follow instructions and compose multiple function calls as tools from 139 Python libraries. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%.

- Blog: https://hf.co/blog/leaderboard-bigcodebench
- Website: https://bigcode-bench.github.io
- Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/bigcodebench-leaderboa...
- Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigcode/bigcodebench
- Code: https://github.com/bigcode-project/bigcodebench
- Paper: https://github.com/bigcode-bench/bigcode-bench.github.io/blo...
"""

Looks promising. Has anyone tried out this new benchmark?
"..the grid operator to request that Electricite de France SA take several nuclear plants offline."

Could you read the article please?

The lumbering beasts, which actually do hate changing output at all, turned off before the renewables.

Secondly, another below comment already explains that no, there's not a shortage.

Thirdly, please for f*ks sake, engage your brain and think what the impact of 700 euros a month (high in 2022) to negative prices now has on industry. What the everloving ** do I charge my customers?

Maybe this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40679507
And why are the established parties doing this? Why is it in their interest to keep advancing terrible candidates?

I dunno. I kinda do think voters are the problem. Or at least a link in a chain of problems, the next link up being corporate controlled media.
How about MAXAR/Planet?
Surprised his Wikipedia page has not been updated. Yet.
The article says that particles are neither waves nor particles, which is not wrong (depending on your definition of “wave”), but it omits to mention what the actual fundamental ontology is in modern particle physics.
Did paid OSS for 3 years, best years of my career. Great team mates, great code, everything done for a good reason, no managers, no politics, nothing.

Only problem was I made only barely enough to cover my expenses so wasn't getting ahead in life but it was still worth it.
There are ways to deal with that though, and yeah there's LVT, or you could have higher taxes on empty storefronts, to incentivize landlords to rent.
I had always had wanted to ask him if he didn’t think now that his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all, and that LLMs are the experimental proof of Skinner’s idea that simple conditioning can give rise to something that, to us, looks like intelligence.

Now I’ll never know.

(But maybe the two of them can have a discussion now in the afterlife, now that their worldly egos and public opinion are out of the way.)
Everyone complains about the aesthetics, and I feel it too, but I have no idea what they should do. The surface treatments on these buildings have a lot of variety and aesthetic interest, with many colors and textures. They often add other physical variety with outset and inset portions of the building. It's not uncommon to have different shapes at the roofline. I can't think of historical apartment buildings that are any more interesting or pleasant if you look at them objectively.

And yet... there is a kind of tedium to them. Some of that is just efficient use of space, they tend to go up in very rectangular blocks. Maybe that's just the inevitable reaction to the most common new structure of our time.
Brands Are Beginning to Turn Against AI
Overcommunication vs. Radio Silence: Finding the Sweet Spot for Productive Teams
Back 20 years ago in college I emailed Chomsky with a number of questions about the global issues of the day. I received a detailed, point-by-point response from him that very evening.

For a public intellectual he was really approachable, RIP.
That's fair, but it'll keep individuals from ending up clicking to so many junk sites. And the more people using search engines that allow them to fight back against enshittification, the better.
It's a tough situation. Once you have an installed base, your hands get tied. I miss the early days when I could rework the UI and UX of the product regularly. Now there is a lot of legwork to make sure we're not changing existing workflows (documented or undocumented). That said, I like that we're making money, so I can't complain too much.

I viscerally understand how companies can get stuck and unable to change their products significantly because their installed base will revolt. It's a tough situation.
It was actually much easier than I expected. Just asked for it as a single HTML page, copied the output to a file and opened it on Chrome. Did very few adjustments.
I have worked for non profits and social good companies for the last 5 or 6 years. I make about 75% of what I did as a manager and 50% of what I could be making now.

Economically, my space is not in a good space right now. I have been considering going back to a "normal" job for a bit more income security.
I wonder why exactly this is posted as a google translation of a portuguese article.

Is it perhaps a play on the work done by Chomsky in algorithmical syntactical language analysis, and how it relates to the modern Deep Learning advancedments in the form of automated Translation?
New UNESCO report warns that Generative AI threatens Holocaust memory