skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take a ball of mud, apply pressure and time, and you sometimes get a septarian concretion. They can be quite beautiful, I have a pair of bookends cut from one on my shelf.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p4432023.m...

I've seen some big balls of software mud that formed very nicely under pressure too.
Gen AI images always seemed freaky to me as they cause folk to want to generate bizarre and freakish images and spread them. I don't like horror movies for a reason and don't want to see AI generated garbage at all.
a) If you ask me about surgery I will say "I don't know". LLMs won't do that.

b) Experts may give wrong answers but it will happen once. LLMs will do it over and over again.
This seems to have a slightly shorter support lifetime than you'd normally get with a Mac. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772 is all phrased in terms of "when Apple stopped distributing them for sale", which happened in March.
“Record mode”, where for 24h all permissions are automatically granted on first use, would be an obvious improvement.

The ability to measure what permissions you need and record them automatically would improve the onboarding experience immeasurably.
Seems its rare to hear a defense in favor of dynamic linking (aside from vague allusions to "resource use", especially in light of "successor languages" seemingly moving away from this approach. Thanks for this.
Who links images you have to login to view?
Tell that to Boing-Boing, with their AI-generated images of politicians ...
The Boy Scout rule.
I was thinking more the iron age is hard to access underwater.
Isn't swimming taught in schools?
Nobody is denying the existence of batterygate. Apple now describe the throttling on their website. The class action is around the notification to the users when the feature first came out. If they got “caught” then the feature wouldn’t still exist today, but it does.

> Then when they got caught they came up with plausible deniability.

This is the bit you need to prove. You are implying that they were maliciously doing something underhand rather than implementing a feature to stop degraded batteries causing reboots. How do you implement the exact features required for degraded battery management when you are trying to do something else like slow phones to sell more? That’s the bit you need to explain.
AudioMulch?
Same here! Also, when it’s on the right toggling it doesn’t move the code panes left and right.
Another question, why does nobody care about the enormous and absurd energy cost to train and run models?
Wow, is that true? And the documentation is thousands of pages! I can't understand how Intel keep these processors consistent during development. It must be a really, really hard job.

It was a nice period in history when proper RISC was working well, when we could get stuff to run faster, but getting more transistors was expensive. Now we can't get it to run faster but we can get billions of transistors, making stuff more complicated being the way to more performance.

I wonder if we ever again will get a time where simplification is a valid option...
One of the most popular types of content is now remuxed (not reencoded or recompressed) 4k blu-ray rips that can be anywhere from 50-150Gb per disc. In the DVD/Blu-ray era movies were often reencoded to lower bitrates the way streaming services now do and had tiny original sources. Those files were orders of magnitude smaller (600Mb-1.5Gb typically).

The people who still care enough to pirate in the era of ubiquitous streaming are often doing it explicitly to get the best possible quality, because no streaming service now offers anything of comparable fidelity for any price.
This is a case of managing technology teams with the mindset of a product manager. It can also be said that it is an effort to find a solution to a problem that does not exist. I prefer 2 teams that work much more dynamically to 18 teams dealing with a very small region.
Quote: “People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

No, it hasn't. If anything AI, as it currently stands, made sure that the "bottom creativity" is gone. For example I am simply anti-talent at drawing. For me a street artist that does caricatures is creativity. Looking closer you see that the artist is actually very limited in his techniques and uses but just a few easy tricks - this was explained to me by a friend who's an artist, a true one, with shows and galleries. So now AI made sure "that!" creativity was erased and is at fingertips for everybody. I see that as a good sign, not a bad one. True creativity is still the panache of humans - I mean AI can create masterpieces like GRR Martin? (if only the old sob would move his rear to finish them, that's it).
Automating *arr with torrents isn't too bad depending on which trackers you use.
NixOS 24.05 contains an older version of zed, as feature updates are generally not backported to stable NixOS releases. Try running the package from nixos-unstable instead.
> 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.

Even in a relationship, you have to own your own choices and be responsible for your own happiness. Seems like an ideal situation at least. As one of the few couples who can afford to live a good life on a single income, she'd already have far more opportunities than most. All choices involve sacrifices. If she wanted to work or they wanted to hire someone to come in to help take care of the house/kids it wouldn't necessarily change much for him.
You'd consider it a bug because you can fix a bug. Doesn't seem like the tech's there yet, but it's still good enough to be useful.
Check out the user author of those comments. You are replying to a different person. I did not write those words.
I love the Practice of Programming. Of all the books on programming that I've read, the lessons of that book are the ones that remain strongest in my mind. I've not read it in many years but I feel it influences my practice everyday.
8gb of ram seems like a poor decision
If my account has only got one thing in it, I don’t expect to manage permissions at all.

“Everything has root” is fine when you are starting a new thing - what’s needed is tooling to start there and grow into fine grained permissions when you add a second thing.
If you haven't tried a 144hz or even a 240hz gaming PC, you should. You can really feel the difference dragging things around the screen.

(I'm not sure I would notice typing, but for dragging windows around I could never go back to 60fps.)
And likewise: in case it wasn't clear, it's a great article! I wasn't meaning to criticize it, just add a little further perspective for the common scenario that many first-time audio programming folks encounter.
> “Must be water based, since that’s what we know,”

This one is an assumption, but it's a pretty good one.

Equilibrium chemistry has a fairly narrow band of energy in which things can be pushed to one side or the other without completely dissociating. A solvent is almost always required as a medium and water is about as "simple" as that gets.

Sub-zero chemistries might work, but they would be much slower than water--life might take longer than the age of the universe to evolve. Molten chemistries don't seem to be able to hang together long enough to be reversible.

While the "building blocks" of life might be different, given our current knowledge of physics, the probability that the solvent for life is water is likely very high.
Think of it as a system returning complex results after a search. Think of it as a synthetic search result. Think of it as a result where you still have to evaluate the source for reliability. Think of it as a junior engineer making mistakes. Think of it as a reason why you will have job security for complex tasks because the easy tasks can be done by dumber project managers. Think of it like you are now a senior engineer with a junior engineer doing the mundane stuff.

Do the mundane stuff in school/college/boot camp. Do the cool stuff at work.
He’s replying to a different person, I did not write the words he’s quoted.
We've banned the other user, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>b) Experts may give wrong answers but it will happen once. LLMs will do it over and over again.

Well... Sometimes "experts" will give the wrong answer repeatedly.
Quite a lot of people are.
> I drive a 2020 Toyota Corolla Hybrid, which I bought used in Spring 2021. It has four wheels (well, five if you count the steering wheel), airbags, a stereo, and it gets 55 miles to the gallon. Unless it’s hiding something, I think that’s about it.

Thats a pretty big strawman? This 'simple' car took thousands of people and many millions or billions of direct r&d. It has many more features than what was listed and it is fundamentally a complex beast. Reliability =/= simplicity.

Whatever software product your trying to sell that was build by a team of a half-dozen and mostly used off the shelf components is not a good comparison for the complexity of a car.
> This kind of strawman "limitations of LLMs" is a bit silly. EVERYONE knows it can't do everything a human can

A large amount of people--many of them with money to invest--seem to believe otherwise.
I suspect the biggest issue is that courses like to talk about how instructions are encoded, and that can be difficult with x86 considering how complex the encoding scheme is. Personally, I don't think x86 is all that bad as long as you look at a small useful subset of instructions and ignore legacy and encoding.
The numbers "5%", "3%" and "8%" don't appear anywhere at all in the article. What are you talking about?
Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze
Line go up. The only three words that matter nowadays.
Advanced Core Image: Custom Metal Kernels
Of course most everyone cares, but the value proposition is high enough that people aren't going to hold off on using it until it is perfect.

Nonetheless, as with autopilot, you don't want to substitute paying attention with it. "Trust, but verify" as Reagan said.
If we're throwing "citation needed" tags on stuff, how about the first sentence?

"Large language models with vision capabilities (VLMs), e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro are powering countless image-text processing applications"

I don't know how many a "countless" is, but I think we've gotten really sloppy in terms of what counts for LLMs as a demonstrated, durable win in a concrete task attached to well-measured outcomes and holding up over even modest periods of time.

This stuff is really promising and lots of builders are making lots of nifty things, so if that counts as an application then maybe we're at countless, but in the enterprise and in government and in refereed academic literature we seem to be at the proof-of-concept phase. Impressive chat bots as a use case are pretty dialed in, enough people claim that they help with coding that I tend to believe it's a real thing (I never seem to come out ahead of going directly to the source, StackOverflow).

The amount of breathless press on this seems "countless", so maybe I missed the totally rigorous case study on how X company became Y percent more profitable by doing Z thing with LLMs (or similar), and if so I'd be grateful for citations, but neither Google nor any of the big models seem to know about it.
The underlying thesis of the article is that high salaries in the Gulf will outweigh the downsides of working in low-rule-of-law authoritarian states with onerously rigid managerial and social structures, which ... might work out for some folks, but if you haven't worked with Gulf-domiciled companies before I wouldn't recommend signing a long-term contract before testing out those waters.
The point is to look less elitist.
Your point is valid if you believe LLM/Generative AI is deterministic; it is not. It is inference-based, and thus it provides different answers even given the same input at times.

The question then becomes, "How wrong can it be and still be useful?" This depends on the use case. It is much harder for applications that require high deterministic output but less important for those that do not. So yes, it does provide wrong outputs, but it depends on what the output is and the tolerance for variation. In the context of Question and Answer, where there is only one right answer, it may seem wrong, but it could also provide the right answer in three different ways. Therefore, understanding your tolerance for variation is most important, in my humble opinion.
Not only that, but you can ask it to rewrite it in iambic pentameter and with pirate-speak identifiers.

Really begs the question of what the long-term outlook is for the non-top-quartile people. Maybe re-prompting LLMs is the new ball of mud?
Assuming they aren't convinced they are wrong - and multiple opinions can be valid while differing. The world isnt always black and white. An AI can never be convinced it's wrong permanently, and sometimes it can't be convinced ed temporarily, depending on the model
I work in AI product eng for a larger company. The honest answer is that with good RAG and few-shot prompting, we can consider actual incorrect output to be a serious and reproducible bug. This means that when we call LLMs in production, we get about the same wrong-answer rate as we do any other kind of product engineering bug.
0.5% -> 0.7% = 40% increase in fees, for affected customers.

(edit: 0.7% not 0.8%)
In many cases, I think it's far more likely that an image would not be included if it required paying an artist. It could be stock art or photos almost as easily and with that, not many people are getting paid for it.
I’ll be honest, every day people tell me the magical things all these new AI tools can do and I try them and usually find the results useless.

Every AI chatbot I’ve ever interacted with has been unable to help me. The things I’ve had them write do usually pass the Turing Test, but are rarely even close to as good as what I could write myself. (I admit, being self-employed for a long time, I can just avoid a lot of busy work that many people cannot, so I may be missing lots of great use cases there. I never find myself having to write something that isn’t great and wanting to just get it over with. AI might be great if you do. )

I’ve been trying to use image/video creation to do lots of other things and I’ve not even come close to getting anything usable.

I appreciate certain things (ability to summarize, great voice to text transcription, etc.) but find a lot of it to be not very useful and overhyped in its current form.
Yes, too many people post that sort of unsubstantive comment—the cheap one-liner is maybe the biggest forum cliché there is—but that doesn't make it ok.

I believe you that you intended something more thoughtful, but the rest of us don't have access to your intention (or the real meaning of the comment in your head). We can only go by what you actually post, so if you want to make a more thoughtful point, you need to do so explicitly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> But, meanwhile, if you want to test under equal conditions, you can disable VSCode's optimization by disabling this setting:

Disabling the advantages of one application vs another is just kneecapping the superior editor IMO.
Here's to hoping that Aptera becomes a regular car someday.

https://aptera.us/cpc-group-agreement/
We shouldn't conclude that UK is X or Y based on the writings of one person.
The article calls these folks "swamp guides"
Email suggestions such as this to mods at hn@ycombinator.com
Apparently yes. I tried installing xdg-desktop-portal-gtk at first, but that didn't work. xdg-desktop-portal-kde did.

But now I get issues that are likely due to problems with downloading language server binaries and running them, as the parent comment indicated. When I open a Rust project it says "Language server rust-analyzer-2024-07-08 (id 1) status update: Failed to load workspaces."

Also, it dumps core every time I quit. :)
Games are a different story, especially single player games without a live service component. Most of us write software that needs to be maintained and iterated on. It has nothing to do with "finding meaning" in work and everything to do with delivering to a reasonable standard in a reasonable time in a sustainable way.
It’s really not that bad unless you really don’t want to be found. Most DMCA/copyright firms just do a basic investigation which stops at the IP AFAIK.

Mullvad and I’m sure other modern VPN clients have “kill switches” built-in that shuts down traffic if the tunnel isn’t on. You can also do a leak check before starting anything up.
I didn't care too much at first because it seemed that the rate of improvement was sufficient to cover a multitude of sins. But I'm starting to, because it is becoming clear that progress hit an absolute brick wall with GPT4. If anything it has has gone backward since then.

Just today, ChatGPT4o screwed up a rudimentary arithmetic problem ( https://i.imgur.com/2jNXPBF.png ) that I'd swear the previous GPT4 model would have gotten right.

And then there's this shitshow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40894167 Which is still happening as of this morning, only now all my previous history is gone. Nothing left but links to other peoples' chats. If someone at OpenAI still cares what they are doing, it's not obvious.
It was the first time I’ve ever read it and I was surprised how much of it still held true given it’s 25 years old. Some of the specific programming examples are pretty outdated, but the general ideas are as solid as ever!
I have fallen in love with Zed on Mac, so glad to see it will still be an option when I switch back to Linux. My main concern is the collaboration features; just seems like a nonsensical addition. I have zero influence over what editors my teams use, and I work with dozens of different people on collaborative development every year - I'm not going to be persuading anyone to switch, and so that feature is just dead code and security risk. Even if I worked on a small and consistent team, I don't think the value-add justifies the complexity and risk.
They Hit Their Health Care Deductible. It Was Time to Party
Related: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/...
Wouldn’t seedboxes be far more dangerous? The provider absolutely can see what you are doing on the box and provide that to the authorities whereas a VPN provider that doesn’t log activity, well there’s no paper trail at least retroactively.
It can give wrong answers sometimes and still be useful. Also there are many tasks where it almost always gives correct answers, text to speech with function calling is 100x better now than it was 2 years ago. And in some spaces, correctness is a fuzzy concept anyway (creative spaces).
The assumption here is, plate tectonics are required for intelligent life. Which is an interesting theory, but not much more I think. We don't even know what is required for the formation of life at all.
What did I do last year?

Last month?

Last week?

How does that correlate with what’s ahead?

Something like that would keep me from relearning the same stuff over and over would be very helpful. I suffer from a TBI and do my recall/remember well. Whenever I do technical work, I have to constantly relearn steps. Would be nice to have those steps easily accessible, without effort from the user.
Personally, I and people I've spoken with use LLMs less and less because of how often they're wrong. The other day I asked ChatGPT about a specific built-in method in Java and it told me that it couldn't do one specific thing. I was already using it in that context so I pushed back and it said "Oh yeah you're right, sorry"

I feel like I can't trust anything it says. Mostly I use it to parse things I don't understand and then do my own verification that it's correct.

All that to say, from my perspective, they're losing some small amount of ground. The other side is that the big corps that run them don't want their golden gooses to be cooked. So they keep pushing them and shoving them into everything unnecessarily and we just have to eat it.

So I think it's a perception thing. The corps want us to think it's super useful so it continues to give them record profits. While the rest of us are slowly waking up to how useless they are if they will confidently tell us incorrect answers and are moving away from it.

So you may just be seeing sleezy marketing at work here.
> Wine/Proton is suitable for nearly 100% of machines running Linux. Steam has reduces this complexity to a few clicks for the majority of titles.

Why would one dual boot if games work so well?
> You probably happened to have VSCode configured to do something that mitigates the problems of having an extremely long single line, while Vim was not configured to do that.

Defaults matter.
In this metaphor, removing the car of someone who was going to drink and drive but didn't, is certainly not a crime. Presumably though you mean removing the car after drunk driving actually took place - which might be, but probably depends a lot on if the person knew, and what the intent of the action was.

In the current case - its unclear if any crime took place at all, it seems clear that the primary intent was to prevent future crime not hide evidence of past ones. Most importantly the past version of the app is not destroyed (presumably). Github still has the version of the software without the copyright filter. If relavent and appropriate, the court could order them to produce the original version. It can't be destroying evidence if the evidence was not destroyed.
Feels like there is a similarity in a big ball of software mud and complaining about the layout of a website. Does it do the job? Yes? Cool, moving on.
> If your DSP callback executes in 1ms 99.99% of the time but sometimes takes 10ms, you’re hosed.

I tend to agree, but...

From my recollection of using Zoom-- it has this bizarre but workable recovery method for network interruptions. Either the server or the client keeps some amount of the last input audio in a buffer. Then if the server detects connection problems at time 't', it grabs the buffer from t - 1 seconds all the way until the server detects better connectivity. Then it starts a race condition, playing back that amount of the buffer to all clients at something like 1.5 speed. From what I remember, this algo typically wins the race and saves the client from having to repeat themselves.

That's not happening inside a DSP routine. But my point is that some clever engineer(s) at Zoom realized that missing deadlines in audio delivery does not necessarily mean "hosed." I'm also going to rankly speculate that every other video conferencing tool hard-coupled missing deadlines with "hosed," and that's why Zoom is the only one where I've ever experienced the benefit of that feature.
You continue to miss my point. Your point is a lazy, "the future will get here whenever it does" perspective. Mine is incentivizing discovery brings future innovations sooner.
> However, it should be noted that the Drake equation is more of a thought experiment to highlight what we know and what we don't know about the evolution of technological life, rather than an absolute guide to the number of civilizations out there.

I fully agree with your second paragraph though.
> Approximately half of gaming revenue is from PC customers

Whales.
https://bobbiechen.com/blog/2022/7/21/what-if-your-website-h... - but think about the (tiny) infrastructure savings!
Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it