skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we’re bringing up fiction, why are we assuming Star Trek and not Cephalopods like in Arrival or completely alien morphologies like in Scavenger’s Reign. Even if there is a humanoid involved it could be as a host or slave for the intelligent life that controls it (eg dominion in Star Trek). With a sample size of n=1 of our planet (with no quantifiable way to even measure and compare intelligence), I think we’d be assuming a lot to make the conclusions you are making even if we restrict ourselves to those that can build up industry or even leave their planet. I’m also not sure why we’d care so much about leaving a planet - we’re desperately looking for any sign of life which would be a momentous discovery in and of itself. As for Orcas, don’t underestimate just how deadly humans are - we outcompeted concurrent competing intelligent hominids by killing or mating with them and regularly decimate wildlife and consume resources at a rapid pace. No reason to believe that an alien Orca with thumbs couldn’t eventually accomplish the things we did without ever leaving the water.

Star Trek used humanoids because of practical special effects at the time and because it would be easier for the audience to identify with the aliens and make the show more accessible, not because there’s some underlying scientific reasoning going on.

To make any predictions about the shape that intelligent aliens would take would require some probabilistic falsifiable model that would tell us where to look and what we’d find. Anything other than that would rely on very shaky first order reasoning which is what we’re doing to guess that there is likely intelligent life somewhere.
It'd be interesting to see how Sonnet 3.5 does at this. I've found Sonnet a step change better than Opus, and for a fraction of the cost. Opus for me is already far better than GPT-4. And same as the poster found, GPT-4o is plain worse at reasoning.

Edit: Better at chain of thought, long running agentic tasks, following rigid directions.
Most systems would require you to anonymously prove ownership of a the credential, not have an unchanging bearer token.

So yes, you could steal the private key I guess. But that is no worse than if you have to prove your identity; someone could get your password to your account.
banning tiktok is a good way to get younger people to vote

55% of younger people voted in 2020 compared to 66% turnout overall. it seems incredibly foolish to ignore that demo just because they have 10% points lower turnout

combine this ban with Trump's recent stance on tipped wages & Biden's polling and it is looking awful for Ds among precisely the demos they need to get to turnout
Super Mario will be 40 next year
Congrats to the team. IIRC their CTO was the creator of RocksDB.
This comment appears to be copied from the OP
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/06/anniversary-is-te...

(which is fine, but worth clariifying)

and it's also posted at

https://forums.insertcredit.com/t/is-tetris-really-40-this-y...

by the same commenter.

Not sure how these sites are related.

`gingerbeardman crossposted their own comment, perhaps. And both sites use the same commenting system?
The correct answer in that case is to go to the Inspector General. That's what they're there for. Leaders sweeping shit under the rug that ends up crippling a fleet asset and preventing tasking from higher is precisely the kind of negligence and incompetence the IG is designed to root out.

And I say that as a retired officer.
But if you are driving (and thus can haul unlimited weight including huge solar panels, batteries and inverters) it seems like the existing Starlink dish would be fine, and this looks like might be worse since it doesn't have automatic orientation.
there's a process-control failure here - the reason the traditional drive-through works is that the cars stay in order and if it gets crowded then they can't reach the order speaker so it's rate-limited. The touchscreens don't do this at all, it's failure mode is the crowd just gets bigger and bigger. And since the workers don't _have_ to interact with the customers, they mostly don't, so exceptions don't get noticed or handled. I'm sure GrubHub and Uber Eats deal with similar issues to some degree, but at least in those cases the customer isn't stuck standing there, plus the apps can keep tabs on order progress and you can escalate issues. the McDonald's model is just fire and forget. And it's not just McDonalds! Taco Bell has the _exact_ same design with the exact same failure mode
> resold

But the content is not being resold.

Turing-test passing AIs have an existential right to read and learn as much as humans do.
The context to this conversation is the launch of a space shuttle that's supposed to carry a teacher to space. It has both enormous stakes and enormous political pressure to not delay/cancel. I'm unsure why that context makes the spherical cow version of "easy" a sensible one.
It's an extremely old word
Mosquitoes released in Hawaii to save rare birds from extinction
On the whole it did only slow the tide. Yet it wasn't enough alone, limited to one OS, in one market, for only ~4 years, at a time when Google was pushing its own from some of the world's most popular services. Still, every victory is worth celebrating.

Moping every time a (modestly successful) approach is brought up isn't going to move the needle.

Dominant browsers rely on many tricks to gain and hold their position. It will take more than one approach to restore a balance.
There will always be demand for people that can:

1. Solve problems.

2. Communicate complex issues in a way everybody can understand.

3. Discover the real problem that is trying to be solved instead of the perceived problem or per-determined solution.

The technical tools at your disposal are constantly evolving but the principles remain the same.
Also there have been a history of ‘industry’ influenced studies in the opposite direction.

The whole thing is solidly dirty.
You're right, but there are two versions of how big works. One is you're buying something to solve a career need, the other is you're buying something to solve a business need.
Similarly, I spent 6 weeks on a kernel token-ring driver intermittent initialization issue. This required kernel restarts over and over to observe the issue. Breakpoints were useless as they hid the issue. Turns out initialization in a specific step was not synchronous and reading the status was a race condition. It tooks weeks of staring, joking around, thinking, bs'ing, then suddenly, voila. Changed the order of the code, worked.
The Mainstreaming of 'AI' Scepticism
> There is a significant amount of evidence

Can you share it?
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40739777
> Some risk is acceptable. If I were to go to the moon, let’s say, I would accept a 50% risk of death. I would be happy to do it. Other people would accept a risk of investment and work hour loss. It’s not so black or white that you wouldn’t go if there’s any risk.

It's possible you're just suicidal, but I'm reading this more as false internet bravado. A 50% risk of death on a mission to space is totally unacceptable. It's not like anyone will die if you don't go now; you can afford to take the time to eliminate all known risks of this magnitude.
I was under the impression that kagi is a paid service. I don't mind what others do, but I'm personally opposed to paying what I consider extortion fees to avoid being smothered in toxic waste. As a bit of an idealist, I hold that some things should be free, notably access to freely extent digital data.

That said, even if I've mistaken, I frequently see positive reports of kagi.

Thanks for the recommendation.
‘Everyone is trying to save the world, they just can’t agree on how.’

As it were.

Though some do seem to think the way to save the world is for them to get filthy rich and everyone else to die.
When the touchscreens first came out, it was a relatively decent experience. You just chose what you wanted, maybe made a few simple modifications, and then you were done.

I went more recently and the touchscreens have adopted the same adversarial behavior that plagues much of the internet. Every other screen is begging you to add something else to your order that you have to click to close, or pushing an item that you didn't want. Dark patterns galore.
foraging, skinning, herbalism, small engine repair…
Opus is better than GPT-4? I've heard mixed experiences.
I feel this too, I think it's because Java is an artifact of layers of innovation that have accumulated over time, which weren't present at its inception. Langchain is similar, but has been developing even more rapidly than Java did.

I still find LC really useful if you stick to the core abstractions. That tends to minimize the dependency issues.
There's usually some way to "cheat" to make things easier. In this case, orders don't need to ask go into a single globally accessible instantaneously updated database like BigTable. A McDonald's in San Francisco doesn't care what a McDonald's in Paris' customers have ordered right that second. Or even the one down the street. So the worst you could do is give each restaurant their own copy of the stack. And that stack meds to handle maybe 3 orders a minute? The busiest McDonald's still isn't going to be all that busy in orders per second, relative to a busy website. Everything you can do to optimize and use fewer resources per restaurant is an optimization and cost reduction problem,
but the base problem is inherently tractable. Chick-fil-A runs an Edge Kubernetes cluster at each of their 2800 restaurants.
You seem to be implying all abstractions are equal, its just use-case dependent. I disagree- some really are worse than others. In your webdev example, it would not be hard to contrive a framework designed to frustrate. This can also happen by accident. Sometimes bad products really do waste time.

In the case of LangChain, I think it was an earnest attempt, but a misguided one. So I'm grateful for LangChain's attempt, and attempts to correct- especially since itis free to use. But there are alternatives that I would rather give a shot first.
This may have been posted before, but recently put a lot of effort into making this page better.

New features:

- Lots more links to the homepages of creators. Check out some of these! Some of the most interesting, most pristine pages on the web.

- New sparkline showing a histogram of when creators were born.

- Download as JSON/TSV/CSV links.

- All this data is now stored in a single file using ScrollSets (Check out the source: https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/main/creators/creators.s...) ... More on ScrollSets: https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html

Still a lot more data to add. Pull requests appreciated!
By speaking with someone older than me, and by working through it with a therapist. Is this valid enough an answer? I offered a counter-argument to GP, but neither I nor GP have the "correct" solution to your particular crisis.
A habit I picked up from the format of one person preaching to a meeting room.

Take notes, or barring that use fingers or verbal cues (or other memory palace tricks) to keyword myself to remember the multitude of things I want to bringup or am monitoring to see if they're addressed.

I ended up getting a Remarkable for exactly this reason, and all my poorly scrawled notes ended up being very useful to make sure key thoughts and responses were raised at relevant times.
> this can mean building some untrivial infra

As someone that does it all the time on 10b+ record tables, not really? if you don't have extra resources to build the occasional index your DB is under-provisioned and you're close to falling over, cluster or not.
This is like complaining that someone mentions the Spanish language instead of Español.
> I'm not sure that most people are really all that comfortable. They're a lot more distracted though certainly.

I think people in wealthy countries like the USA are very physically comfortable, but also quite unhappy- possibly much more unhappy day to day than they were historically when there was a lot more disease and discomfort- and a lot of that is directly a result of excess comfort combined with a life without any real difficulty, challenge, or sense of meaningful purpose. We feel like we want comfort, but it's mostly harmful to us. Humans just aren't built to be "house pets." People need a sense of purpose, of overcoming difficult challenge, and an ability to directly see positive results from their efforts. The challenges need to be both mental, and physical.

What we have now is lots of empty entertainment, stupor inducing comfort, and lots of sedentary careers that feel pointless, where nobody even notices the difference if you work hard or not. More and more people are burned out at work, and socially isolated.

I don't think the answer is to go "backwards" and lose all of our progress in treating disease, making labor easier, etc. but in a cultural and personal change where we find some new meaning and challenges, to grow even more. Personally, I've found this through being a scientist where I can work on hard problems, as well as doing physically demanding and uncomfortable hobbies like weight training, fasting, and cold water swimming.

I've noticed that the more intentional physical discomfort I experience, e.g. from cold, the more content I feel, and the less I crave comfort, or other addictive things like social media and overeating.
reread the subject :)
That metaphorical barn is run by Kathy Lueders. Look her up and it might soften your thinking a bit.
Gifted and high performing are not synonymous though.

Giftedness is more about being developmentally more advanced and having high ability and/or potential in some area. It makes them out of sync with their peers. There are many theories, one of which is Dabrowski’s over excitabilities, but in essence they do function differently from others.

Some gifted students are high performing students but a surprisingly number are not. Many gifted kids struggle with motivation and persistence. True gifted programs deal with the needs of gifted kids development — the so called gifted programs in schools today are more like accelerated classes which have little to do with developmental needs. Giftedness is a special need on the other side of the spectrum.

I think we all know the type: really intelligent kid but amounted to not much in life. (The most well known pop culture portrayal was Good Will Hunting although that’s all fictionalized and not gifted kid is at that level — there are different levels)
Exactly. A specific API. Foe SQL that is good, but for smaller things a proper interpolation thing is great.
Genuine question: can someone point me to a use case where langchain makes the problem easier to solve than using the openai/anthropic/ollama SDKs directly? I've gotten a lot of advice to use langchain, but the docs haven't really shown me how it simplifies the task, or at least not more than using an SDK directly.

I really want to at least understand when to use this as a tool but so far I've been failing to figure it out. Some of the things that I tried applying it for:

- Doing a kind of function calling (or at least, implementing the schema validation) for non-gpt models

- parsing out code snippets from responses (and ignoring the rest of the output)

- Having the output of a prompt return as a simple enum without hallucinations

- process a piece of information in multiple steps, like a decision tree, to create structured output about some text (is this a directory listing or a document with content? What category is it? Is it NSFW? What is the reason for it being NSFW?)

Any resources are appreciated
A better analogy would be to buy a '60s sports car that predates nearly all modern safety tech at auction for $$$$$$ instead of just buying a 2024 Corolla with modern safety features.
A form of communication I encountered a while back, called 3-way communication, helps with this.

Essentially saying back to the person what they tried to communicate with you. You can leverage that to lead in with your own comments, as they're primed to listen by listening to their own words given back.
I can already use multiple backends by writing different code. The value-add langchain would need to prove is whether i can get better results using their abstractions compared to me doing it manually. Every time I’ve looked at how langchain’s prompts are constructed, they went wayyy against LLM vendor guidance so I have doubts.

Also the downside of not being able to easily tweak prompts based on experiments (crucial!)

And not to mention the library doesn’t actually live up to this use case, and you immediately (IME) run into “you actually can’t use a _Chain with provider _ if you want to use their _ API”, so I ultimately did have to care about whats supposed to be abstracted over
I think people forget the early 2000s. Many sites only worked on IE but Firefox was the better browser. Firefox users had an extension that would open certain links in IE or open the current page in IE via the context menu.

If a lightweight browser could be significantly faster and more secure, people would tolerate using two browsers again. Although Ladybird hasn't reached that bar.

YouTube certainly could use a small set of web standards, although YT regularly breaks on Firefox. It's a video player with links and forms.
Wake me up when AI is able to compete with a software engineer with almost two decades in the field.

Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write a single line of code.
Loved text adventures since my CPC6128 days. They are about the only things I could still use my Psion 5 for. I have Lost Treasures 1 and 2, and the Classics on CD.

This is fantastic: http://www.getlamp.com/

You can also hunt down the Infocom Universe Bootleg. It has pretty much all the games, bonus games, invisiclues, IUB database, software tools.

IUB.zip is 397.5mb zipped
A long time ago I burned out and took a few years of leave from tech and instead took a document processing / generation job at a very large non tech travel / leisure focused company. Company used an archaic document generation system that had to have templates built by hand. then there was a significant amount of manual work moving data from microsoft excel to word. All Manual. My group consisted of myself, 4 other document processors, 2 leads and a director.

This team generated all of the sales documents for the company; thousands of templates.

Within weeks I wrote some VBA macros that automated 75% of the process and they promoted me to manager a couple months later.

What I found fascinating though was the group of existing document specialists were not suddenly capable of doing 2 - 3x the work. They just appeared to move slower. It was like pulling blood from a stone. They had no interest in learning new work which they were now free to do, they just wanted to clock in, turn their mind off for 8 hours, click the button and clock out.

40% of the staff at large companies are likely not needed and can be automated away.

Kind of made me feel sad.
Natural gas is much cheaper than oil so we will use natural gas to generate electricity
> 100 reasons not to change

I'm reminded of the article "Layers of Management == Layers of Veto" [0]. In the article the author explains that each layer of management is likely to veto each idea coming from below. Each idea that didn't come from above is "insubordination" and likely to be vetoed.

[0] https://slott56.github.io/2010_02_12-layers_of_management_la...
Had me in the the first half ngl.
> Either way, the claim that there are 0 paths here for a super intelligence is pretty strong so I feel like we can agree on: It'd be tricky, but possible given sufficient cleverness.

Agreed, although I'd modify it a bit:

A SI can trick lots of people (humans have succeeded, surely SI will be better), and the remaining untricked people, even if a healthy 50% of the population, will not be enough to maintain social stability.

The lack of social stability is enough to blow up society. I don't think SI survives either though.

If we argue that SI has a motive and a survival instinct, maybe this fact becomes self-moderating? Like the virus that cannot kill its host quickly?
> I want to put it in a section of my tv show.

The example just does not apply because AIs are only learning from the source content; they're not redisplaying or reselling the source content, not even as a part of a whole.
Apple won't roll out AI tech in EU market over regulatory concerns
The Journeyman Project
Yes that is exactly it!
It was Jimmy Carter and not Ronald Reagan who scrapped the civil service competency exams. Government getting worse has been a two-party affair for quite some time. No one has any incentive to fix it, and the system is so vast, so complex, and so self-serving that no one even has the power to fix it (as things stand).
That's because the sample size is probably small and for niche prompts or topics.

It's very hard to evaluate whether a model is better than another, especially doing it in a scientifically sound way is time consuming and hard.

This is why I find these types of comments like "model X is so much better than model Y" to be about as useful as "chocolate ice cream is so much better than vanilla"
https://archive.ph/UFDra
RocksDB is a fork of LevelDB created by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat at Google.
But but inner dialog?
Awesome suggestion, thanks!
AI Video Startup HeyGen Valued at $500M in Funding Round
Why Did Americans Stop Caring About the National Debt?
Sometimes I feel a little bad we're foisting 4 languages on our kids, plus two more within a 20 minute drive so I expect some basics there will be picked up too.

Our eldest likes language battles: she's corrects me in another language but the game is that I must continue in the 'wrong' one.
That’s interesting. Thanks for the examples. Are there any places where people post such real-world observations of unsupervised, language learning?
10b+ record table and trillions indexed rows on single machine are very different tasks.
Most of the time, this isn't even the executive's choice but a requirement of their corporate liability insurance. It would be nice if we could just find responsible executives to fix these types of issues, but they're systemic.
Firefox doesn't control major web properties from which it can nag users to switch. Chrome (and similar chokepoint-holders like Safari) won't be unseated by market forces for years, maybe decades. We are on the road to technology feudalism as the web and browsers eat the world.
Thank you for your feedback!

I agree with your point about the licensing. I would also add that tools for the development of compiler front-ends are quite a niche market. So, honestly speaking, I don't plan to earn much from my project regardless of the license terms. This work is part of a higher-level in-progress toolset, which is closer to the end users. I have dedicated it as a separate project primarily for public preview, with some restrictions on distribution and use, as I haven't decided on the overall toolset distribution model yet. But it is possible that I will change the licensing terms of Lady Deirdre in the future to something less restrictive (maybe even MIT) to make it more popular, this is just not my current goal. I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause.
OpenAI has billions of dollars and nothing but GPUs to spend it on. This isn’t strategic per-se, it’s just rollup. Good place to be in for any data-adjacent product company.

Google and Amazon followed the same strategy for over a decade just buying anything that was possibly helpful.
Giuseppe! Long time no see. Rockset’s architecture changed somewhat since we last talked— not in fundamental ways, but in ways that would alleviate your concerns.

If you want to talk (not secret) technical details, you know where to find me :)

-Tudor.