skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: The notion "LLMs are sucking the oxygen out of AI research"
Not sure if I'm recalling the quote exactly but I'm wondering if it's entirely accurate...

Any research into Neural Networks is beneficial overall. There's so much research spurred by Transformers that it makes me think the original AI research is still going on but with less exposure.

We've seen massive networks forced into very small footprints which is insane. There have also been behemoth efforts in training at scale which also contributes to research, development, and IT infrastructure.

I love ML. I've been doing it since I was a kid in 2006 wondering what the hell a picture of a saddle had to do with making my Markov-like chatbot talk. (I accidentally reinvented a Markov chain without knowing what it was. It was a very bad implementation though and didn't work too well.)

My point is that now that the AI hype seems to be finally dying down, what is your opinion on the state of AI research?

Breakthroughs were the reason we got this far; I don't think LLMs have sucked the life out of AI, I think they've invigorated it and caused more people to be curious like I was many years ago.
Worth it, I reckon. You can't buy this kind of advertising:

https://xkcd.com/548/
I would hope the server literally authorizing the user to modify the field after correctly authenticating the user implies "authorized use" under the CFAA, but I'm not a lawyer and I'm not familiar with the law here.
"mini planes that fly"... that doesn't require a jet engine, and certainly not one built from scratch.

As many have already mentioned, building a jet engine from scratch isn't exactly easy or cheap. In your position I would get a battery, electric motors, propeller, microcontroller and a 3D printer, then figure it out from there.

I know it's probably a bit off from what you wanted, but it's a "cost efficient" way to actually built something. Once you have something flying you can upgrade from there...

I am currently in the process of building my own drone from scratch this way, designing the drone and programming the remote control, flight controller completely myself... it is/was a lot harder than I expected. So, what I am trying to say is: don't be afraid to use of the shelf components and don't make things harder than they have to be. Get started, then get creative.

Just my experience with this.
This is exactly the sort of post that gives me a ray of hope that the Internet still has some of its old magic in it.

Thank you for this. Very well done.
The anti nuclear power movement in Europe was also pretty strongly influenced by Soviet info ops. The Soviets badly wanted to sell natural gas to Europe, because it was one of the only products that the Soviet Union was competitive on in the Western export market.

Nuclear was, in the 70s, looking like potentially a complete replacement for gas, as it almost became in France. Slowing down or stopping nuclear in Europe was a big priority for KGB active measures.
>I believe the argument is generally that they are advertising for the business whenever driving a company vehicle with logos on it.

The linked IRS document specifically says

>For example, a pickup truck qualifies if it is clearly marked with permanently affixed decals, special painting, or other advertising associated with your trade, business, or function and meets either of the following requirements.

(emphasis mine)
That's not really possible, because they contractually require venues and performing artists to only perform at their venues

This kind of gross exclusionary contract should be illegal (it's kinda the same BS that Google does with Android OEMs - contractually force them to [1]), but for some reason antitrust avoided acting on the matter (including allowing acquisitions in the space) for quite some time

[1]
> Predicating the availability of any of Google’s apps, including the Google Play Store, on OEMs not taking advantage of the open source nature of Android on devices that will not include Google apps seems much more problematic than Google insisting its apps be distributed in a bundle. The latter is Google’s prerogative; the former is dictating OEM actions just because Google can.
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-commission-versus-...
Learning how to spin up a Windows VM in Linux was what finally gave me the courage to take the training wheels off and abandon Windows as my daily driver, after decades.
I really cannot fathom enjoying any "art" produced by an AI, excepting art that uses it as an assistant for boring tasks like texturing a video game.
"Muse". Lol. Good irony in that name. Like marrying your realgirl.
Created work even in a commercial capacity is protected IP. having AI train on those models for a publicly consumed LLM may not even be in the best interests of profit.

Law hasn't even evolved either. What if in the future people bring special tradecraft to companies that they don't want leaking elsewhere? who knows. the door is still open.
"Violation of Bell inequality by photon scattering on a two-level emitter" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02543-8

- "Quantum dot photon emitters violate Bell inequality in new study"
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-quantum-dot-photon-emitters-vi...

Bell's Theorem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
> you can use `stty` to change a lot of stuff about the terminal, including how it deals with inputs

> You can rewire all of these defaults and behaviors

I've also found this article on implementing a terminal text editor to be illuminating:

https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/02.enteringRawMode...

Also, just in case anyone is wondering, as I once did, where many of these magical-looking stty parameters and symbols are coming from: they are control sequences defined a long time ago. A lot of stuff is defined in ambiguous old standards from the 70s such as ECMA-48 that include such arcane terminology not seen anywhere else.

For example, jargon like Select Graphic Rendition basically refers to a 70s version of the HTML <font> tag.

SGR<params>TextSGR<0>
<font params>Text</font>

Where params are something like 38/2 RGB to set foreground color. The parameter 0 clears the current style.

ESC[38;2;R;G;BmTextESC[0m
<font color="#RGB">Text</font>

ESC = The literal ASCII escape character
ESC[ = CSI = Control Sequence Introducer
m = SGR = Select Graphic Rendition
38 = Set foreground color
2 = Use the RGB color space
RGB = Color
0 = Reset style back to defaults

Parameters come before the command. Kind of backwards.

They even had the same implementation issues we have today with browsers. Terminals were and stil are inconsistent in what they implemented and how they did it. Stuff like colors is pretty well supported but many other features aren't. For example, SGR<7> is supposed to enable "negative image" mode, whatever that is. Standard doesn't really explain. Some terminals choose to do reverse video, other terminals do other equally valid things and to this day people have problems with it.
I'm curious how developers' sentiment towards code generation tools like Copilot compares to artists' sentiment towards art generation tools like MJ/SD/DallE.

As a developer myself, I want to see coding as a creative act and feel uneasy about the idea of relying on a tool that makes the code one tab away. But I also recognize most of the coding we do is in a commercial context where artistic expression is less relevant.
Taking a step back and thinking about this, this vulnerability/bad decision was a result of systemic disorganization.

It's not just the developer who wrote said code, as well as the backend developers who receive these outputs, but further, the organization did not have any kind of test/check and balance/security mechanism in place.

It's terrible given the router, especially in a world of IoT, may be the device on your network that should be the most secure.

Finally, now that it's public how bad the organization at Linksys is, it is trivial for a criminal to pay an employee to purposefully include backdoors.

The consumer router scene needs a security focused disruption.
At a base level, the claim that water intensity of livestock is more to blame for CA water issues does not seem to be supported. Water use for livestock, feed, and silage is about ~27% of total applied agricultural water in the state, wheres an outright majority thereof goes to orchards and vineyards[0].

Moreover, water is the least mobile aspect of agriculture. Land can be put to different use, products can be shipped, but water is pretty much where it is; moving it ranges from generationally difficult (e.g. CVP, SWP, ...) to physically impractical (e.g. lifting the Colorado to irrigate upstream). Water supply systems are effectively closed and separate. Any analysis of competing uses has to take place within the context of that closed system. The average water intensity of livestock does not matter; only the fraction of that intensity demanded from CA population-rivalrous sources. As it stands that's "some" (and much more from feed _importers_ than is reasonable, as the other comment notes[1]). Converting more central valley to unirrigated rangeland, and topping up nutritional deficits with imported feed would be hugely beneficial for CA water issues, even though it's a 'water intense' product.

[0]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-californias-ag...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40915369
Well... why are you using Docker?
It's fucking NFTs again. The vague promise that it somehow creates value for your audience. The promise of "community". The completely empty platitudes about a new and exciting world. And of course the FOMO of "early leg up" on some inevitable future.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-10-30
I think your comment is emblematic of the very divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world that leads to frustration like what the artists here are expressing.

No one becomes an artist except because of passion for the work. It sure as hell isn’t for the money. That’s not so universally true in Silicon Valley, and I’m guessing you’re one of those people who views their job mostly as a means to fund the rest of their lifestyle.
Are American Jobs All That Bad?
> just like it's foolish to think corporate programmers will be a thing at some point in the future.

I don't think corporate programmers are obsolete. How will a sophisticated AI programmer in the future be any different than a human programmer in an outsourcing firm?
The author of the mail is Solar Designer, a bit of a legend AFAIC. He has no need to pump up his brand and he really really knows what he's doing.
When are we going to automate things like handyman or plumbing work? WTF are we automating artistic creation?
Two reasons commonly cited:

- The perception that founders with big tech "credentials" stand a better chance of success than those without. The founders of Humane were ex-Apple.

- The idea that founders will generally be more successful on their second try, even if their first ended up being a complete trash fire - see Adam Neumann's new venture. This one sounds more reasonable on the surface but I've got no data to back it.
Is a father an “external party”?
Computable doesn’t mean it’s easy to write down the implementation.
I think one solution is to help them have your idea and take credit for it. If it’s their idea then they are already convinced it’s a good one. Persistent people can get a lot done when they don’t care about who gets the credit.
No, this viewpoint is the only reason a shirt doesn't cost a month's wages. Weavers once had similar arguments, decrying machinery that made cloth. Imagine how many more video games and movies can be made when we don't need anywhere near as many artists as before. How many more diagrams in textbooks. How many extra illustrations for Wikipedia.

There are tremendous benefits to making art something anyone can get for dirt cheap.
I'm so tired of these people on the fringe. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares about your opinions on mathematics, science, medicine, or 99.99% of all the subjects where as a student you're there to learn, not provide an opinion.

This is your first clue that the overwhelming majority of the folks on the Right have never gone to college. They have this fantasy that the time in calculus is spent talking about the rights of Drag Queens. The only course I took where you were encouraged to express an opinion as an Argumentation & Debate class - and that class demanded you back up that opinion with facts and evidence! You weren't allowed to simply spout a bunch of nonsense!
That sounds like a non-example. Why do you need invasive, personalized surveillance for that? Traffic and aggregate data are an entirely different question.
Yeah, I've heard of that. It still sounds like a local minimum, though.
This is focused on people whose job it is to write documentation, but I think it applies generally. A previous company I worked at moved away from Read The Docs to Confluence and it was terrible. This decision was resisted by much of engineering because we recognised that disconnecting documentation from code would make it worse, it did.
The question is when they used it or understood it _as a number_. The greeks didn't even consider 1 to be a number, since "number" implied a "multitude". It was controversial as to whether 1 was a number up until the 1400s or 1500s, let alone zero.
It’s a separate facility which has to be approved, built, and operated beyond the existing water supply infrastructure. It’s not unworkable but you have the problem that everyone’s water bill goes up compared to what they’re paying now, and that leads to political consequences, which is why everyone has kicked it down the proverbial road hoping that it’ll either get cheaper or the supply problems will become bad enough that nobody questions the need.
p.s. The Muse in that email is not even a art generation tool. It's a just a rent-seeking business that profits off of other people's work.
The joys of responding to someone who is so confused about terminology that you have trouble even figuring out what they meant to so...

> How can we justify not steelmanning a ternary approach to halting?

I'm not certain I understand what you mean here. In actual practice, the usual approach to undecidable problems--which come up all the time in compilers and formal methods, mind you--is to build a trichotomy of "yes", "no", and "don't know" (sometimes expressed "timeout"). What undecidability says is we can't squeeze the "don't know" category down to nothing, but in many circumstances, that's just fine.

> Can someone show me one proof which doesn’t rely on “muh do the opposite” (how do we know the halts program can’t detect this and crash with Err(ParadoxError)?) or the circular logic appeal to Rice’s theorem which itself depends on halts being undecidable?

Depending on how you define "muh do the opposite", this may be impossible. The essential crux of the theorem is that once your system reaches a certain level of power, it admits the possibilities of quines, which enables a level of self-reference that leads to paradoxes.

The best attempt I can give, that only indirectly reaches into self-reference is this:

Let f(x) be a program that returns the size of the smallest size program needed to output x (this is called Kolmogrov complexity). Let h(p) be a program that returns whether or not the input program p will halt. If h(p) exists, then f(x) necessarily exists:

for p = 1 to infinity:
if h(p) is true:
if p computes x: return sizeof(p)

If f(x) exists, we can write g(y) (informally, output the smallest integer that has at least a given Kolmogrov complexity) as follows:

for x = 1 to infinity:
if f(x) > y:
return x

However, we have a paradox now. If g exists, it has a size, which of course bounds the maximum complexity of its output. But we've just asserted that the output has to have a minimum complexity--and if we choose the bounds right, there's no possible overlap. Consequently, something in the construction must be wrong. Yet I've given the code for every program but the halting program... which means the halting program itself can't exist.
Sure, but many people who are bad at art and writing would like AI to make art and writing that's tailored to their tastes and are fine doing laundry and dishes since they're good at that and we have already automated 99% of it with dishwashers and dryers.
Little short for a prompt for the industrial replicator, but we'll fill in the blanks. How many million copies do you need?
You seem to have a massive category error here. To my understanding, this is not only going to circumvent the scraping protection of companies that scrape other people's data.
The words "human" and "man" are etymologically unrelated. It's just a coincidence they both have m-a-n in them.
The role will remain, but the job will change dramatically into one with a higher level of product focus. The "software craftsmen" type will become more obsolete than they are already. RAM used to matter. Now, who even looks at how much RAM their app uses?
Like jesus i've seen 90s sites that are nicer to look at than this wtf am i looking at.
What a glorious time to be in the field… Crazy to think we have allowed technically incompetent people to make these decisions
Does it support deoptimization back to bytecode? That's useful for dynamic language JITs.
Tach – A Python tool to enforce dependencies, written in Rust
You are right, ‘legal definition’ isn’t right, but the legal doctrine derives from the Michigan Supreme Court’s ruling in Dodge vs Ford Motor co.

“Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919), is a case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers.”

This has been often sited as the beginning of ‘shareholder primacy,’ which has become parodied into the particularly stupid (if often accurate) meme of ‘line must go up.’
I agree with what you said. I fall into this trap from time to time. The most recent one occurred in yesterday. I was supposed to follow some tutorials to set up development in Windows using Visual Studio and a bunch of libraries (SDL2, gml, imgui, etc.). My first setup took about an hour and the sample project seemed to work when running in Debugger, but failed to start when clicked directly in File Explorer. I got so frustrated that I almost gave up. I did manage to muster some strength to start over, and fortunately this time it worked.

Situations like that reminded me how impatience I was, have been and am. What struck me most, is that back in the 70s and 80s, microcomputer developers (such as Romero, Carmack and others) usually did not have access to any tutorial or even books (unless one is lucky to live close to a university or a large public library). The best thing they had are the manuals and specifications, and they were free to shoot in their feet and figure out what might it be. Many people actually dropped out, but some of them persisted and managed to come out as the pioneers of the time.

At the age of 40+, I'm a bit ashamed that I'm not as persistent as them, when they were at their 20s and 30s back then. I'm thinking about getting some trainings or therapy sessions regarding my impatience.
> most people would rather

Citation please. Once it is explained to them how it could work, what the failure cases are, what false positives cause (with real life examples, since it has already happened), etc, I doubt this would be even remotely true.
It's probably related to the default browser shortcut which loads `foo.com` when entering `foo` in the address bar, and pressing `Ctrl-Enter`
I've noticed a number of wildly different products recalled for listeria recently. I wonder what's going on.

Off the top of my head; yogurt, spinach, chicken, ice cream, and now almond* milk?

I'm somewhat concerned.
Furthermore the Muse's title is free of cutesy fad words -- "cringeworthy"?
While what you're saying is morally and ethically correct, unfortunately we have entered times where the capitalistic machine doesn't find this to be true.
Just to nit pick a little, because I don't want to paint the whole profession of Marketing with one terrible brush. These dystopian spyware-tracking-ads are just one of the "four P's" of Marketing: Promotion. And it's not even really Promotion in the traditional sense, it's something much more personally intrusive, not just at people's eyes but into their psychology. It's a two-way communication rather than a one-way "sales pitch." And the return communication (from us to the Marketer) is happening without our consent.

I think we need a fifth P or something: Psychologic Warfare? I don't know, I don't write the Marketing textbooks.
Consumers deserve far better than what they're getting from network gear manufacturers—crap, and grossly overpriced crap. I wish Apple would get back into the game and at least offer some grossly overpriced non-crap.
What is an example of a life saving reason to go faster? What are the chances of that situation happening vs a situation where the young driver will exceed the speed limit and cause injury?
> Maven/Gradle stuff. I'm sure it's intuitive when you're using it a ton

Maven was okay, Gradle less so. It comes down to being opinionated or infinitely flexible, and being infinitely flexible means that Gradle can be infinitely complex if you have "one of those people" on your team.

Gradle, in my opinion, was a bad move.
I think the missing piece is the generative AI being tied to a physical embodiment. My point is, we need the physical machine but we also need to work on this generative AI aspect to manipulate the machine. Unfortunately, making pictures and writing text seems to be the lowest hanging fruit of the Transformer AI era since we have significant datasets already available. Several companies are working on creating datasets to train transformers to apply to other tasks and I suspect we'll start seeing the results in a couple to a few years. Not sure how long before we have a consumer bot doing the laundry and dishes though.
Personally I'm a fan of writing your first draft of documentation before writing the first line of code.
Stability AI Releases Stable Assistant Features
> “Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1, or to the whole part of a mixed number. Only positive integers were considered, making the term synonymous with the natural numbers”

In fact, they didn't even consider 1 to be a number, let alone zero -- at least aristotle didn't, and his definition was the accepted one in Europe for many centuries.

Though I think you need to sort of separate out what philosophers and mathematicians thought about numbers from what regular people did. I think people obviously had an intuitive understanding of zero and one as quantities, even if it wasn't formally defined that way by philosophers for thousands of years.
> If you want to curb consumption you have to price in the externalities. This is true for everything - fast fashion and cheap flights too.

I agree with the idea that a capitalist society should work harder than we do to price in externalities in order to fulfill the social value of a free market.

As a counter example to it being the only way though is how the modern world has drastically reduced and now culturally shuns (although we still have things to fix) human slavery without doing it via economic sanctions or price regulation.

I don't actually have any hope here though - politically in the US I see more of a slide away from free markets and toward techno-feudalism and culturally in the US I see a backslide in empathy and personal values people are willing to make sacrifices for.

You can't regulate people into having particular values (for good or for ill).
Without containers, how do you prevent some dependency going rogue or bonkas and messing with files outside of the project directory?
But Cotton is not Culture.
yup, it's probably an automated system end to end.

and it's definitely getting the spammers a lot of leads and sales.