skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, if you dealt with a person who knew all the vocabulary related to a field, and could make well-constructed sentences about that field, and sounded confident, it would almost always mean they had spent a lot of time studying that field. That tends to mean that, although they may occasionally make a mistake, they will usually be correct. People apply the same intuition to LLMs, and because it's not a person (and it's not intelligent), this intuition is way off.

There is, additionally, the fact that there is no easy (or even medium difficult) way to fix this aspect of LLM's, and it means that the choices are either:
1) ship it now anyway and hope people pay for it regardless
2) admit that this is a niche product, useful in certain situations but not for most

Option 1 means you get a lot of money (at least for a little while). Option 2 doesn't.
It's not visible on the outside in western societies because outright saying "you're a boy and we're looking for a girl" is outright illegal (in 99% of roles). They need to be a bit more subtle than that. e.g. make a "women only/highly encouraged" event that happens to have a job fair.

I guess in Asia there is no such barrier. So the results and backlash are equally more explicit.
Brain Study Reveals How Curiosity Arises in Kids
>Humans have the ability to "refine" their perception of an image iteratively

That's not related to embodied cognition.
> Ultimately it should be his wife's responsibility to make sure that she feels accomplished right?

No. In a healthy relationship partners care about each other. This means also enabling them to pursue their dreams. It’s not just talking, it’s also doing something, e.g. taking parental leave or sacrificing your own opportunities so that your wife could use hers. Without this kind of support she won’t have much choice.
In US law to establish standing, you have to demonstrate injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability based on the Article III limit requiring courts to address "cases" and "controversies."

This makes us great at redressing harm, and terrible at preventing harm. A lot of modern technology is such an effective force multiplier that the process of establishing standing and having a hearing before a preliminary injunction can be catastrophic, far beyond what was possible when the Constitution was drafted.

Under Chevron, judges deferred to reasonable regulatory interpretations. Now it's a slower, more adversarial process.

I hope you're right and the answer is to just grow the government and judiciary.
OpenAI board is as odd as the Theranos board. All that's missing at this point is a five star general.
> Not sure how the courts could get around that.

Like any other law, they rule it as unconstitutional. Appeal its way up to the SCOTUS, and they will ultimately decide if they want to keep the power or give it back to the regulatory agencies.
The discipline informed by science is computer engineering. They have to worry about, e.g., things melting.

I'm critical of computability as discussed here to some degree, in that many of the algorithms in effect do not compute anything but instead melt a computer, or the earth, or would otherwise deplete the environment of negentropy without answering the question.

In standard mathematical analysis there is no behavior "at" infinity, rather we may have some decent picture of what happens at each n (a series' remainder, truncation error, a bound on the value of certain terms, etc.), and talk about what happens to it for greater and greater n, as you mention. This is that other science, numerical methods and analysis.

Is it fair to compare the two? If I recall this right every register machine is associated with a system of diophantine equations, with the number of variables about equal to the register count, and the size of the system equal to the length of the program. This is a precise representation of the machine at any step n for a given starting state.

To do computer science really analytically you have to solve huge systems of dio equations or something equivalent. Beyond sounding hard, this was Hilbert's 10th problem and has long been answered as not possible. We've been puzzled by these systems all along since antiquity.

I am pretty ambivalent towards thinking of BB numbers as scientific results, for the basic assumption of every working model we have (that erasure of a bit is possible) would break before they could compute a result. But at the same time, we are not the first constructivists -- the situation is really puzzling still. I think we no longer realize how shocking some early-mid 20th century results were to mathematicians and logicians of the time. This still hasn't been resolved, nor on the "other" side in physics. We'd love to have the tools we have in applied math in computer science, but that's what all the fuss is about.
So, binaries, warez, images, and the like?

A backchannel to download papers from sci-hub?

Or are people using Usenet as a way to send encrypted messages in a way that makes traffic analysis more difficult? (If 50,000 people download everything to a group, and post encrypted or steganographic message to that group, then it's easier than seeing that X sent an email blob to Y.)

Or, Usenet as the new numbers station?
Everyone wants to lower the cost of labor, but you can only get so much blood from a stone. People will do something else if software engineering isn't profitable. That's how things are going in the post-0% interest rates world. Software engineers aren't individually getting paid less, but less speculative software is being written. In 2021, everyone thought that the way to get rich was by throwing 200 software engineers at a shopping cart app. In 2024, the way is to have 10 people making a shopping cart, 10 people making a database, 10 people running HR reports, ... I don't think this makes the size of the industry smaller, but makes "I am sure I will find something interesting to do at this super company" less likely. There are no super companies anymore. (Except Nvidia.)

Anyway, the way we increase efficiency is by automating more things. 50 years ago, you had to have a person come to your house to collect letters from you, then they would be mailed across the country, and another person would deliver it to the recipient. Now we have email, and you can just send someone a letter with no other humans in the loop. That's the efficiency increase that engineering brings, and even if we can't envision what we're going to do tomorrow, it will continue. What that means is that we will always need more engineers, and the scope of our role will increase faster than we make more humans to be engineers.
Based on this table there's been a 1100% increase over the last 7 years, with a 60% increase between 2020 and 2021.

I'd be interested to see WHY this is the case. Is it attributable to a larger share of data that cannot be compressed vs more compressible data (e.g., Warez/Movies)?

It just seems highly unlikely this is driven by a growing user base; but, without more details other than this data table, I am at a loss for the reasons why.
I'm not sure how that makes it a bolt-on or conflicting or complicated. It is indeed not a simple central spreadsheet of 'who can do X on Y', but that would not be feasible at AWS scale.

Microsoft tries that with Entra and it's a pretty miserable experience. Google has CEL for the conditionals which is neat, but it gets rather close to software engineering rather than IAM configuration at that point. The somewhat hierarchical nature they use is also not as great as it seems on first glance.
Stolen from dang [0] on the last submission with that submission added in:

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481309 - Apr 2023 (32 comments)

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28915865 - Oct 2021 (23 comments)

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22365496 - Feb 2020 (48 comments)

Big Ball of Mud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650011 - Nov 2019 (1 comment)

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484045 - Nov 2019 (1 comment)

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716667 - Feb 2017 (6 comments)

Big Ball of Mud (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9989424 - Aug 2015 (9 comments)

Big Ball of Mud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6745991 - Nov 2013 (21 comments)

Big Ball of Mud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911445 - Oct 2009 (2 comments)

The "Big Ball of Mud" Pattern - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10259 - April 2007 (2 comments)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35484495
I’m also curious about this. This morning I needed to generate summaries of news articles when I noticed Bing AI was inserting facts that weren’t present in the source article. (Not correct at all) It really hurts the potential of what AI could do if I have to double check everything it generates. We wouldn’t accept a spreadsheet program that required double checking with a calculator, why do LLMs get a pass?
Sometimes a big ball of mud is exactly what’s needed.

Undertale has a single giant switch statement thousands of cases long for every line of dialog in the game. There are other stories of how infamously bad the code is. And none of that mattered one bit.

Banks are another example. The software is horrible. Everyone knows it. Yet all that’s required is minimally working software that fails rarely enough that the bank can maintain their lock in.

Believe it or not, being hired to work on a big ball of mud can be pretty chill. The key is for you to be in a stage in your life where you don’t really care about your work beyond meeting professional responsibilities. Big ball of mud codebases are the best for that, because everyone’s there for the same reasons, and the assignments are always easy drudgery. Neither Scottrade nor Thomson Reuters cared too much what I was up to as long as I was there at 9am.

It’s soul crushing for people who want to create nice things, or seek meaning in their work, which is partly why I left. But when you just need the money, there’s no substitute.
First impressions:

1. curl | sh, seriously
2. The default theme is so low-contrast that I seriously struggled to read text. I could not find something that was, like, actual white on actual black.
3. I can figure out how to enable Copilot, but not to open a file. (I had to resort to “zed file.cpp” from a terminal.)
4. vim keybindings are not bad, but also not perfect.
5. It feels… laggy? Isn't this supposed to be fast? Whenever I move the cursor over a symbol, it first moves and then like 100 ms later, it tries to highlight that symbol everywhere. And that takes time. In a 200-line file.
6. Ugh programming ligatures. Where are preferences to turn it off? Where are the preferences for anything?

OK, well, I guess I could use this if I had nothing better. But if the point is that it's supposed to be zero-lag, #5 really destroys the point for me.
(1) Some problems are probabilistic either in theory or practice. For instance there could be a sentiment analysis problem where the state of the art was 67% accuracy 5 years ago and with an LLM it is easy to get 85% accuracy. 100% accuracy is going to be impossible anyway because sometimes you really can't figure how somebody feels.

(2) It's a big topic that could be addressed in different ways but I'll boil it down to "people are sloppy" and that many people become uncomfortable with complex problems that have high stakes answers and will trade correctness for good vibes.

(3) LLMs are good at seducing people. To take an example, I know that I was born the same day as a famous baseball player who was also born exactly a year before an even more famous cricket player. I tried to get Microsoft's Copilot to recognize this situation but it struggled, thinking they were born on the same day or a day apart rather than a whole year. Once I laid it out explicitly and my own personal connection it had effusive praise and said I must be really happy to be connected to some sports legends like that, which I am. That kind of praise works on people.

(4) A lot of people think that fixing LLMs is going to be easy. For instance I'll point out that Copilot is completely unable to put items in orders that aren't excessively easy (like US states in reverse alphabetical order) and others will point out that Copilot could just write a Python program that does the sorting.

That's right and it is part of the answer, but it just puts off the problem. What's really irksome about Copilot's inability to sort is that it doesn't know that it can't sort, if you ask it what the probability is that it will sort a list in the right order it will tell you that it is very high. It's not so easy to know what is possible in terms of algorithms either, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture

as evidence that it's (practically) impossible to completely understand very simple programs. See the book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

for interesting meditations on what a chatbot can and can't do. My take is that LLMs as we know them will reach an asymptote and not improve explosively with more investment, but who knows?
> ... except they're History graduates who went to Eton

For the non-British readers here, Eton is a boarding school [0] west of London. It's where nearly all the elite members of British politics and society attend from ages 13 to 18. Like, all the royalty go there. And Harry Potter is like just cribbing from what these boarding schools do. When you hear some British actor in a movie or something say '... Old Boy, ...', they are referring being very wealthy and graduating from one of these boarding schools.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, they are nearly all child abuse nightmare zones, Eton especially. Like, there's a wiki page dedicated to the controversies there [1].

I got into looking into Eton when I was researching the history of the various football codes. Eton was the birthplace of two of the nascent footballs: The Field game [2] and the Wall game [3]. I'll skip the history lesson here and the rules briefing. The thing that stood out to me about the Wall game was the ceremony around it. Specifically, that it's played on St Andrew's Day (November 30th) by the Collegers (rich boys) and the rest of the school (slightly less rich boys). Now, the Collegers have this tradition (500+ years old) where they all get roaring drunk the night before and are trying to play this wall game really hungover, which makes it all a bit more 'fair'. They traditionally get so drunk that the little headmater-y person in charge just up and leaves for the night. So, you have 13-18 year olds, all drunk as hell, all alone, all night long, and they all kinda hate each other. Like, come on dude.

That little bit alone is just astounding to my non-British eyes and condemn the whole enterprise. But then you read a bit more about the place and it's just ghastly. Then these tortured and abused kids go on to repeat the cycle onto each other, for like hundreds of years, because tradition.

Oh, and then they all go on to run Britain.

So, next time you see some mention of Eton, just imagine Hogwarts but with just brontosaurs levels of abuse and abusers.

Britain is mental my dudes.

[0] The Limeys call them 'public schools', because something something Anglican (?) church something

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College_controversies

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_field_game

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game
Flatpak is just yet another form of fragmentation though.
Those balls look similar to the Google Chrome logo. Total coincidence, I’m sure!
With Excel you might want that calculator.
you don't 'hire more judges.' A political party appoints them. This is simply a way to enshrine right wing rule into the interpretation and application of laws
I won't speak on engineering vs design. but compensation doesn't necessarily correlate perfectly with prestige. Teaching is the easiest example in the opposite way.
While we're on the topic of niche railway games, I highly recommend [NIMBY Rails](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/) - it is the closest you can get to building functional railway systems in a game.
All of my daily driver Apple hardware are in the 2014-2016 vintage, including a Mac Mini, an iMac, several displays, a MacBook Air, and an iPhone 7. They all still work flawlessly--my only complaint is that both the OS and many 3rd party apps have deliberately stopped providing updates for these devices.

It's sad how much longer the hardware outlasts the software (which doesn't wear out).
The codebase I work on is a Big Ball of Mud. It takes roughly 3x the effort to make any functional changes due to this (and thus we have 3x the devs we actually need). When it was framed like that, the business was eager to start a total rewrite project.
What brands of ammo are they selling? Do you have to log in to find out?
Good stuff like Hornady, or some off-brand?
well it's not surprising that the instant the right wing took full control of the judiciary, they dramatically expanded its power.
I wish the article had said who the prime contractor was.
Serious question: why does anybody use Usenet for pirating rather than torrents?

It seems so fundamentally ill-suited to the task.

And if the answer has something to do with privacy or warnings from your ISP, it seems like VPNs would be the answer.

What am I missing?
The feature still exists today. On my iPhone 11 I can go in to the settings under Battery -> Battery Health & Charging and see that I have “Peak Performance Capability”.

This isn’t an issue unique to iPhones either. Different battery chemistries will behave differently and different technology nodes and designs will have varying supply requirements, but in general the internal resistance will increase as the battery ages and cause brownouts as the voltage dips under high load.
There's no "hallucination". This word is simply PR spin to disguise faulty output.
It does mention it:

> For American Rounds, one machine had to be removed from a site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, because of disappointing sales, Magers said.
Can we please instead interpret people's comments in a charitable manner, as we can reasonably assume they were intended, not in the manner that allows us to pick pedantic fights with them?
>In Japan the ratio might as well be zero.

may change in the coming decade or 2. Late 2010's had Japan's version of the US 70's where women entered the workforce in droves. But COVID may or may not have stalled that phenomenon. I imagine they will bring in more women before they loosen their immigration policies.
To give a concrete example: some build systems embed a "build number" in the output that increments for each non-clean build (yeah this is stupid but I have seen it).

This is deterministic (doesn't change randomly), but not idempotent.
Messes tend to beget solutions. My personal theory is it gets messy and then we fix Congress because the bandaid is finally gone.
Ah, good point!

But the model is downstream of the "patch" tokenization, so the cut-down in resolution (compression) of the image has already occurred prior to the point where the model can direct greater "attention".

I think the synthesis is that I'm proposing a per-pixel tokenization with a transformer block whose purpose is to output information at a compression level "equivalent" to that of the patch tokens (is this what an autoencoder is?), but where the attention vector is a function of the full state of the LLM (ie, inclusive of the text surrounding the image)).

Naïvely, I'd think a layer like this that is agnostic to the LLM state needn't be any more computationally costly than the patching computation (both are big honks of linear algebra?), but idk how expensive the "full context attention" feedback is...

(I apologize to anyone who actually understands transformers for my gratuitous (ab|mis)use of terminology)
What's the correlation between code quality and business success?
Perhaps a better word for that would not be conservative but not interventionist. I think some of that is possible (less interventist) but the US unlike the UK is built around the supreme court deciding according to the constitution. The UK makes Parliamentary supremacy work but even if we could throw out the constitution I don't think Americans would trust that idea.

That said getting rid of the Chevron defense and a lot of other rulings from the court have been both very activist, very harmful, and badly argued.
Thanks for the pointer to QEMU's decoder! I actually never looked at it before.

So you coded all the tables manually in C -- interesting, that's quite some effort. I opted to autogenerate the tables (and keep them as data only => smaller memory footprint) [1,2]. That's doable, because x86 encodings are mostly fairly consistent. I can also generate an encoder from it (ok, you don't need that). Re 'custom size "xh"': AVX-512 also has fourth and eighth. Also interesting that you have a separate row for "66+F2". I special case these two (CRC32, MOVBE) instructions with a flag.

I think the prefix decoding is not quite right for x86-64: 26/2e/36/3e are ignored in 64-bit mode, except for 2e/3e as branch-not-taken/taken hints and 3e as notrack. (See SDM Vol. 1 3.3.7.1 "Other segment override prefixes (CS, DS, ES, and SS) are ignored.") Also, REX prefixes that don't immediately preceed the opcode (or VEX/EVEX prefix) are ignored. Anyhow, I need to take a closer look at the decoder with more time. :-)

> For EVEX my plan is to keep the raw bits until after the opcode has been read

I came to the same conclusion that this is necessary with APX. The map+prefix+opcode combination identifies how the other fields are to be interpreted. For AVX-512, storing the last byte was sufficient, but with APX, vvvv got a second meaning.

> Nevertheless there are several cases in which the manual is wrong or doesn't say the whole story.

Yes... especially for corner cases, getting real hardware is the only reliable way to find out, how the CPU behaves.

[1]: https://github.com/aengelke/fadec/blob/master/instrs.txt
[2]: https://github.com/aengelke/fadec/blob/master/decode.c
Don't apologize; GP is being a pedant in order to pick a fight. The "real" definition of "engineer" doesn't matter; your post makes just as much sense if you'd instead used "software developers".
https://www.airwindows.com/consolidated/
The first time I spent time in a rural desert community, where it was clear no one was responding to your 911 call for at least an hour, was when I understood the desire for a shotgun. Or even a weapon of any kind.

I still wouldn't get one, it's against my Buddhist practice, but I understood the fear that comes up a lot better when you're in the middle of nowhere and everyone else around you has guns. And a not insignificant number are probably on meth.
How did you measure the 3x factor?
I was looking for a new phone to finally replace my 7, and considered 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Honestly, I couldn't tell you why I would go for one of them over any others. All I know is that the older ones are cheaper and they'll probably drop software support for the older ones sooner than the newer ones, but they're pretty much identical when it comes to what I use my phone for (making calls, occasionally browsing the web).
It didn't. The previous ruling acknowledged that Congress had delegated that authority.
Technically a huge switch statement isn't a ball of mud. It is mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive.

It may have other issues, but is actually better than what this article is describing.
Then do it on your personal account?
Conversely, this is the CEO of a company that has yearly revenue comparable to the Czech Republic or Pakistan, and at a company that has an extreme level of political influence.

When you're the CEO of a company at that size, you are at the same level of heads of state.

And countries will attempt to attack these CEOs, eg. Jeff Bezos being hacked by the King of Saudi Arabia [0]

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/83dcdf74-3c9b-11ea-a01a-bae547046...