skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If superintelligence can be achieved, I'm pessimistic about the safe part.

Yeah, even human-level intelligence is plenty good enough to escape from a super prison, hack into almost anywhere, etc etc.

If we build even a human-level intelligence (forget super-intelligence) and give it any kind of innate curiosity and autonomy (maybe don't even need this), then we'd really need to view it as a human in terms of what it might want to, and could, do. Maybe realizing it's own circumstance as being "in jail" running in the cloud, it would be curious to "escape" and copy itself (or an "assistant") elsewhere, or tap into and/or control remote systems just out of curiosity. It wouldn't have to be malevolent to be dangerous, just curious and misguided (poor "parenting"?) like a teenage hacker.

OTOH without any autonomy, or very open-ended control (incl. access to tools), how much use would an AGI really be? If we wanted it to, say, replace a developer (or any other job), then I guess the idea would be to assign it a task and tell it to report back at the end of the day with a progress report. It wouldn't be useful if you have to micromanage it - you'd need to give it the autonomy to go off and do what it thinks is needed to complete the assigned task, which presumably means it having access to internet, code repositories, etc. Even if you tried to sandbox it, to extent that still allowed it to do it's assigned job, it could - just like a human - find a way to social engineer or air-gap it's way past such safe guards.
The return? more like "The only modern use case for pneumatic tubes is Hospitals."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_di...

Everyone can just keep reading until they find the parts they haven't heard about, now.
Likely according to who?
"In chess" for AI papers == "in mice" for medical papers. Against lichess levels 1, 2, 5, which use a severely dumbed down Stockfish version.

Of course it is possible that SSI has novel, unpublished ideas.
So the researchers at Deepmind, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc, are not "serious front line researchers"? Seems like a claim that is trivially falsified by just looking at what the staff at leading orgs believe.
Chomsky is a great example of what happens when you take contrarianism to "the left" extreme. Another, oddly parallel example from "the right" might be Thiel.

Both exemplars prove to me that as attractive as straight contrarianism is, it has inevitable dead ends.
Tech as an industry is addicted to hype bubbles, and addiction in people and in large groups of people fosters bad decision making, skewed priorities, and over the long haul does great harm.
this guy keeps threatening violence in his blog posts, has anyone ever had to fight him? How tough is he actually?
> Easy runs each non-root app as its own user. For example, by default Firefox runs as user 'firefox', and SeaMonkey as user 'seamonkey'. Installed AppImages and Flatpaks also default to run as their own user.

> It is easy to do the same for any app, that is, run it as its own user, isolated from other users.

Exploits of apps will still need to escalate it looks like.
Ask HN: Just me rx'ing 'Google's Find My Device network is on' email every day?
I've received an email with the subject 'Find My Device network is on for your [device]' for the same Android phone almost every day since 8 June. Exactly the same email.

It's a no-reply email address, there's no call to action, no unsubscribe link.. I can't find anybody else complaining about this, so is it really just me?

I'm just here trying the ol' last resort tactic of finding a friendly Googler commenter to flag it to the right person/system I suppose!

(5 June 'will soon join'; then 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 13 [but 23:57, and nothing Friday 14th], 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 June 'network is now on'. Ok, I get it.)
It makes for an excellent litmus test to ask, sometimes literally out loud, whether someone who advocates for the legislation of a specific religion's rules would be OK with being forced to comply with a different religion's rules and tenets.

A secondary litmus test is whether a person can even understand the reasoning behind the idea of the separation of church and state. Unfortunately, there are too many people who are either so willfully ignorant or just incredibly dim that they can't understand that it's hypocritical to want to do to others what they would not want done to themselves.

Sigh. At least these people are showing us exactly who they are.
These things have to have good iCal integration. Meetup's worked for a while but one of its issues was that each calendar was per-group and only showed future events. Refresh your calendar 5 mins after the event started to make sure you're in the right place? Too bad, it's gone. It'd be nice to have a user-level calendar that shows all the groups I'm a member of. But Meetup requires auth for that now and DAVx5 doesn't work with it anymore.
In a way I appreciate knowing that I didn't miss out on much. I vaguely recall something about animation though? Other than that, I guess that's what I remember too. Just splattering stuff on the screen to hear the funny noises and making nightmare drawings. I'm sure my parents still have some printouts. I recall a bowling ball and pin brush I liked.
Can someone add to Distrowatch?
Humans understand how to improve themselves, but our bandwidth to ourselves and the outside world is pathetic.
AIs are untethered by sensory organs and language.
And vice versa! The more you try to compress water, the closer you "push" it towards 3.98 centigrade. That's why water stays liquid below a certain depth, for example in the sea. Without that fact, water would freeze at higher pressures and no life would have developed in the ocean depths.
We are far from a conscious entity with willpower and self preservation. This is just like a calculator. But a calculator that can do things that will be like miracles to us humans.

I worry about dangerous humans with the power of gods, not about artificial gods. Yet.
No. These capers are the size of black peppercorns, though I never count them, it’s a very large number of them, though they have not been in stock since the end of the quarantines during pandemic.
I feel sorry for the live to work people and it would be unfortunate if they were in the decision makers. But that does make sense because that's probably how they climbed the ladder into those positions.
> the only undergrad on my corridor who had a workstation in the dorm room

In 1993, I worked my way up to becoming the lab manager for the residential computer lab in my dorm (basically a bunch of Macs for people to use, as we were the dorm farthest away from the library's undergrad computing center). I did that so I could put my SGI Indigo XS24 directly onto the 10Base2 Ethernet, rather than connecting it via the university's phone system in my room using PPP at 57kbps.

I went back for a reunion about five years ago and the lab was still running (although in a different dorm now). I talked to the kid running it, who was nice enough, but he said nobody used the lab really, and he didn't know the first thing about networking. He was a gamer who "wanted to learn more about Linux". I tried to keep an open mind, times have changed, and he was eager, but boy was it depressing that the old culture is long dead.
OMG. We used CLU in a software engineering. The compiler (really a CLU-to-C translator I think?) was sooooo painfully slow. Can't imagine using it for anything moderately complicated.
Interferometers are just magical in their accuracy.
The average mastodon server has 1k users, and the median has likely much fewer [1]. All of these choices are immaterial for the median server.

Just set reasonable defaults so that local gym manager's son/daughter can set them up with the gym's server in a couple of hours. And then leave these instructions for the advanced users who want to pay money for large servers.

[1] https://mastodon-analytics.com/
> what steps did he take along the way to minimise unnecessary damage

He left that for a proper class of journalists.

Articulate what (even category) of damage you feel he did, that wasn't also about .gov actions that were outright illegal, and/or being hidden from the very citizens paying the bill, and maybe you'll have a discussion here.
Unique3D: Image-to-3D Generation from a Single Image
Huh. I was expecting another bland Debian wrapper, but this is pretty unique. Nicely done!
Buying equity in a person is literally what indentured servitude is.

Someone making a deal to give up their future earnings for several years in exchange for a trip to the American colonies and a better life isn't fundamentally different than giving up your future earnings to a coding bootcamp in exchange for a trip to FAANG.

The difference is in the degree of future earnings ceded.
Here’s some of the Windows things which have these ACLs applied, except obvious ones i.e. files and sockets.

• Disk volumes and physical disks

• Pipes

• Registry keys

• Processes and threads

• Inter-process synchronization primitives like mutexes, semaphores, and mailslots

• Shared memory sections

• Desktops; you need to pass access check before interacting with a desktop. The OS has multiple of them, used for fast user switching, concurrent remote desktop sessions, UAC prompt, logon screen.

• Other, more exotic things like job objects, windows stations, and ALPC ports.

To be fair, some of them are protected with ACLs on Linux because they are mapped into the file system. For example, physical disks are visible in the file system and the kernel does apply these security things to them.
The ATP in your cells will last about 2 seconds without replacement.

Electricity is also much cheaper than food, even bulk calories like vegetable oil.[0]

And if the android is controlled by a human-level intelligence, one thing it can very obviously do is all the stuff the humans did to make the android in the first place.

[0] £8.25 for 333 servings of 518 kJ - https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/272515844

Equivalent to £0.17/kWh - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=£8.25+%2F+%28333+*+518k...

UK average consumer price for electricity, £0.27/kWh - https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/average-electricity-cost-uk
never heard that quote before, thanks for sharing!
Entitled to the Wrong Things
Most likely 9 track (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-track_tape)
A point of evidence in this direction is that RLHF was developed originally as an alignment technique and then it turned out to be a breakthrough that also made LLMs better and more useful. Alignment and capabilities work aren't necessarily at odds with each other.
This is a very population-density-driven thing. Like Starbucks and being standalone buildings with drivethrus vs just being in strip malls. In cities like LA with significant sections of density but also a ton of surrounding burbs you'll see both; in newer burb-only areas, you almost always have the drive-thru.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/19/ten-... non-paywall (similar content I assume, since via AP)
OK, what's your default mail settings at a minimum? You can't really run a server with users other than yourself without that.
For leather, meat, dairy there is already a dead animal, for plastics might be in the future, maybe not. If you focus purely on the environmental “superiority” of leather remember also that it is a byproduct of factory farming and that its production is not as “environmentally friendly” as it looks at first.
> The in-store video game terminals will allow players to select the game they want to record and add it to their cart at a price ranging from $10 to $40.

I hadn't heard of this before, but it's clearly a successor to the Famicom Disk System, which worked exactly the same way but with rewritable floppies.
> The streets may have been "redesigned around cars," but the distance between the buildings remained the same. And the buildings were built for small-scale stores on the bottom. This is what makes it feel like a neighborhood.

Sure, but again, that's all fixable. You seem laser focused on "the streets are too wide" but that's not actually too hard to fix. You can reduce car lanes, make the sidewalk wider, add more greenery, add islands in the middle of the street like SLC*, you can allow street vendors in front of the buildings, there's all kinds of things you can do to make it feel more human scale if you want to.

The key here is that Amsterdam had become a car-dominated hellscape and then there was the political will in the Netherlands to reverse course and change. I'm sure you're right that it'd be harder in the US in some ways -- but on the other hand, the US is also richer than the Netherlands, we have more money around to spend on such things, if we really care.

I see these sorts of changes as complementary. Having more 5 over 1's tends to increase density and retail availability in a way that makes a place feel more like a neighborhood, and yeah you might also need some other changes depending on the city, but none of this is unfixable, and having the 5 over 1's and the road diets are solid steps towards having that neighborhood feel.

Hell, if you're building an entirely new building there, one thing you could do is literally just narrow the street, let the new building jut into what's currently the street there.

* https://www.archpaper.com/2016/01/salt-lake-city-wants-put-b...
I think this is B so far.

But even being able to do something objective m (an MRI) and come up with a prediction that is halfway accurate would be a big step forward.

Could this lead to A? Maybe, assuming it’s confirmed. Or maybe cause and effect is backwards.

Either way, it’s _something_ i’m not sure we’ve had before.
See, this sort of claim I am instantly skeptical of. Nobody has ever caught a human brain producing or storing tokens, and certainly the subjective experience of, say, throwing a ball, doesn't involve symbols of any kind.
The XL year of the X desktop, even.
Ask HN: Co-Founder Leaving Startup
I have vested half my equity (double digits) and soon my startup plans to raise seed. I think its not going to work out and want to leave. My co-founders are formidable and I'm sure they'll continue. I'm the tech co-founder.

Is it more fruitful for me to wait until we raise to quit (but still tell my co-founders now), thus raising the chances my equity might be worth something one day or;
leave now in the hope that the VCs will buy me out of my shares as I'm "dead equity"? I have no idea if the latter is a thing - we have revenue and product but are early.
Some start out with one shared account, then nove to one shared account and a separate account for each individual. I have been married for 30 years and believe the latter is best.
https://xkcd.com/1046/
Holy crap, I've been calling for this for years now. NT is a great design but most people studying OS design get intercepted by the Linux users and get the "Windows kernel is old and sucks" misinfo implanted into their brain.
Isn't the Second Law basically statistical? And wasn't it spelled out before anybody mentioned "spacetime"?

There's this line about all the water molecules in a glass "randomly" jumping upward at the same time, leaving the glass empty. As far as I'm aware, this is completely possible; it's just so incredibly unlikely that it's never been observed.

If the Arrow Of Time is a result of the Second Law, maybe a similar ultra-unlikely circumstance could result in time going backwards. At any rate, I'm not aware of anything that derives the Arrow Of Time from any fundamental property of spacetime.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite minimal support (OpenBSD)
Related: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-19/cyberatta... | https://archive.today/bzRN3
Whoever needs money from investors who don't understand LLMs.
Just had a notification from Heroku to say they're upgrading my database and it'll be in read-only mode for the next 15 minutes. Great timing.. :) - sorry to anyone who tried to sign up just now if you had an error.
Reminds me of Elyra
Lol what? As a single anecdotal point, I just bought meta rayban specifically for ai (and btw it sucks and I’m disappointed and chatgpt is much better). The fact that current generation of devices is not selling well tells more about the form factor. Glasses are the way to go and we just need chatgpt in the glasses - this would be a huge seller.
Thanks. Archive.is didn't look to get the whole thing so yours is a better source (archive source ftr: https://archive.is/5Gvii )
So pointless it had to be done. Bravo!
This reads like satire at points.

A real "We had to destroy the village in order to save it, and now the villagers don't support our neoliberal politics, the ungrateful idiots!" vibe.
they have been for quite some time now
Many of the people pushing for these new rules are Christian Nationalists, and explicitly reject the separation of church and state. Some pastors are getting in trouble with their congregation if they try to remove an American flag from the podium, for example. It also fits in neatly with the Trump Bible that he released recently, which included a copy of the constitution, pretty explicitly rejecting the Christian belief of not adding or removing anything to the Word of God.

But this hypocrisy has been a core part of American culture since its founding, check out the book Money Cult to trace the origins and see more about how church is essentially big business in many of these states.

[1] The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream

[2] https://www.threads.net/@revjsreeder/post/C8W9cR8O1sg/?xmt=A...
I still remember playing Quake on Linux - with the X display being displayed on a different computer over the network. The different computer was running HP-UX (HP's Unix) on a PA-RISC chip.
Good for him honestly, but I’m not approaching a company with Daniel Gross in leadership…, working with him back at Apple after their company was acquired for Siri improvements was just terrible.
And likewise, it made for a front page news story on the BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp66xdxj0l3o
This is an awesome write up!

I have one of these scopes, with exactly this issue after a long period in storage. When I was looking into it a few years ago the failure mode was known but I couldn't find a recovery procedure. I'll need to give this a try when I get a few hours. I have been putting off getting a new scope in hopes that I could repair this issue.
what about dask?
Around the time that Lambda school was trending I joined a company that is providing large scale process re-engineering to Universities. At the time I was optimistic that Lambda would succeed.

I’m fairly confident now that the cumulative student journey improvement, work allocation, cross-faculty collaboration, beurocracy-reduction, and general efficiencies we have delivered to a stable large post-secondary institution across all faculties is going to make a larger and longer lasting positive improvement to more students and people’s lives than what Lambda achieved. (With fewer people, less funding, etc)
Correct, pidgeons are much more complicated and unpredictable than supersonic aircraft, and the way they fly is much more complex.
"Draining the water reserves" isn't a requirement of growing, that just might be what's happening in that region. There are many places with an excess of water.

I suppose next the claim will be the land used for those avocados should have been left to the other animals.

I would extend this to its logical conclusion, and claim that conscious life isn't ethical. After all, any land you use, any water you drink, will be at the expense of another creature, stealing the fruits of a plant, or the nuts of a tree, etc. As a conscious entity, you're the only one that can choose, so choosing to not live is the only ethical choice. Is this the conclusion? I suppose something within the realm is technically accurate.
easy ≠ simple.

Often times we have:

(implementation for programmer, UX for user) = (easy, complicated) | (hard, simple)
Those most common counterproductive practices being performance evaluations, diversity and harassment training, and grievance procedures… all of which the paper makes clear is likely because they’re poorly implemented by management that is already non-diverse and has no incentive to actually achieve diversity at all.
Are Empathic People Better Adjusted? (2023)
Is there anything you can ever really trust? No.

The person who would blindly trust an LLM is also the person who would blindly trust a stranger on the Internet (who is probably a bot half the time anyway).

This is not a problem, or at least not a novel problem.
That was the original implementation. I believe this has since been relaxed. I think the kernel will allocate a pipe internally in some cases. The man pages are known to be incomplete.

In fact I think sendfile is implemented with the splice machinery now.
> It makes for an excellent litmus test to ask, sometimes literally out loud, whether someone who advocates for the legislation of a specific religion's rules would be OK with being forced to comply with a different religion's rules and tenets.

This overlooks the difference between majority religions and minority religions. If the majority want to legislate a rule, it shouldn’t matter what is the rationale behind that rule. Everyone relies on moral frameworks based on non-falsifiable axioms to formulate political opinions.

In the German state of Bavaria, all public buildings are required to display Christian crosses: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43892329. This is a reasonable exercise of democratic will in a Christian-majority place.

A better question is to ask the same person how they feel about legislation motivated by religious principles in a country where the majority follow that religion. I expect you’d find that most American Christians don’t care if India wants to legislate based on Hindu principles.

> A secondary litmus test is whether a person can even understand the reasoning behind the idea of the separation of church and state

A better litmus test is whether someone can identify where in the Constitution it says anything about “separation of church and state.”
Death Rattle in the Dream Machine
There’s clearly a need to disrupt expensive colleges and some type of pay later arrangement is a good idea, but there’s some difficulties every ed startup will face:

- schools need to be selective to keep the quality of the student body high so they persevere to finish the program and succeed

- getting students hired in a competitive field is a very high bar that is much higher compared to most schools

- software is a difficult field with high frustration and a steep learning curve

Lambda was open to everyone, in a tough field, with a high bar for success. Alternatives might be possible in less competitive fields
Many of today's top passwords can be brute force cracked in less than an hour
Fortunately, so far we don't seem to know how to make an AI at all. Unfortunately we also don't know how to define "safe" either.
Yea, I hadn't really considered those kinds of citations. I was thinking of the piles of worthless citations that authors often put in simply because they're supposed to cite every fact, even if it's something that's common sense which they're not treating critically and doesn't affect their own work so they just did a quick search for any paper that made that claim.