skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In New Zealand, non-urgent traffic incidents can be reported by calling *555 from a mobile phone. Alpha characters may also be used in phone numbers, such as in 1-800-Flowers.

Is this true? Do carriers actually accept [a-zA-Z] in their phone numbers? (if so, how are they encoded?). I couldn't find any reference to this elsewhere.

I had assumed that advertisement-numbers like `1-800-Flowers` had to be translated by a person when they entered the number on their phone via their keypad.
Comes from this company: https://www.tenyx.com/about-us
The M1 is seriously good. I have a base model M1 with 16GB of RAM, and I've spent approximately zero time waiting while it processes or opens things.

Granted, no gaming or number-crunching (that goes on a server!), just coding, browsers, and Excel.
In this scenario, what is the "commons"?
Monty Python, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek are becoming old. These are references from the 70s. I'd say anime took over as the stereotypical geek culture thing. Japanese otaku and western geeks got along.
Also fantasy became popular over science fiction, the video game landscape has changed dramatically, and of course, younger geeks grew up with the internet more than with TV. Also, there are series like Stranger Things that are definitely geeky.

Things are moving on, we are just getting old.
I’m a simple man. I see a geohot quote in a repo and I star it.
Surely "nearly all" is implicit in the word "revolution" more than in "communist"? (And socialism being so much vaguer in practice that I never know if the person saying it means "The Democratic Party of the USA" or the way that the nordic countries are "socialist", which are a long way from Chinese communism, which is itself denounced as being "state capitalism" by some).
I see, so they found how to grow money by extracting rents from vibrant ecosystems that finally reached critical mass enshittifying them. And that’s why we can’t have nice things under corporate shareholder capitalism.

Sounds like when ancaps complain about taxes, except it is inside private corporations who are accountable not just to customers and vendors in their marketplace but ultimately to shareholders and management teams that give huge bonuses to their CEOs. No thanks I think I prefer autonomous decentralized networks to replace that.

Because the shareholders don’t even live there and dont care if the water is polluted (sometimes they even pay off politicians like in Flynt). OK so you claim these pension funds help pensioners around the country, at the expense of enshittifying things or buying up 25% of real estate or farmland in USA. Monsanto and John Deere IP for farmers enforced by government. Extreme centralization through corporations like BlackRock and State Street, fomenting wars in Ukraine to buy up cheap land there … but I hear socialism is bad. OK.

As far as hyperinflation… they have to tax the money back to remove it from circulation. The current overton window in USA on taxation is so far from that, we’re on our way to massive money printing HERE. The Congress didnt have the guts to raise taxes (fiscal policy) after hugely expansionary monetary policy, so the Fed had to exceed their mandate and raise interest rates to fill the gap. Neither Dems or Republicans have the guts to reduce the deficits long enough to reduce the debt. Cutting taxes only increases the problem of hyperinflation.

If cities had their own currencies they’d have their own fiscal policies too, as well as monetary. Compare how the PIIGS countries fared after they lost their currencies and joined the Euro. For every Zimbabwe and Venezuela hyperinflation there’s multiple countries running out of money and fuel (eg Sri Lanka, Haiti) undergoing austerity or under the thumb of IMF, World Bank being told what to plant etc. Their only hope is to maybe have China hold their leash for a while instead of USA. This isn’t sovereignty. Whether it’s Libya or Saudis or Ukraine or any number of countries.

At least China invests in their infrastructure and tries to make peace deals. USA just does that whole economic hitman thing. Nah. I dont want my pension to be funded by oppressing others.
When Iain (M.) Banks published science fiction (or essays about science fiction), he used “Iain M. Banks.” Other works he used “Iain Banks.”

You can sometimes separate the fans and the topic by how they refer to him.
For reasons, I've written code using docx4j to convert to and from .docx. We did examine Aspose.

Given the complexity of all the things you can do with Word and the immense feature set, if high fidelity is the goal, I don't believe using anything but actual Word and the real Word layout engine will give you that. You'll have to figure out if the licensing problem is one you can live with.
Delight us with your arguments against what the author states in his posts instead of just ad-homineing.
From Wikipedia, quoting the book itself:

""
This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
""
You can't "enhance" from zero. LLMs by design are not capable of reason.

We can observe LLM-like behaviour in humans: all those reactionaries who just parrot whatever catchphrases mass media programmed into them. LLMs are just the computer version of that uncle who thinks Fox News is true and is the reason your nieces have to wear long pants at family gatherings.

He doesn't understand the catchphrases he parrots any more than the chatbots do.

Actual AI will require a kind of modelling that as yet does not exist.
What makes Go's semicolon insertion algorithm different from JavaScript's? They seem similar to me. Isn't it just that the Go compiler requires very strict formatting, which saves you from getting bitten by errors due to unexpected semicolons?
Go back a couple of years and the BBS scene was that times ten. Imagine if everyone in this thread lived within 20 minutes drive of each other, knew each other's real names, and might even recognize each other if they passed on the street. Anyone else feeling too much CRT today? Want to go throw a frisbee around?
We are looking for great people from all around the world. Check out all open roles link, and if any position is interesting for you, you want to "do" things and have impact, just apply!
What is known as "natural gas" is chemically mostly methane if that helps with answering your question.

From what I know it is just cheaper to flare natural gas that occurs as byproduct of oil production than to deal with it otherwise.
Exactly and more generally it'd be interesting to see if those space cell tower live to the promise. I suspect they'd be great for texting and very light web pages but with 7 Mbit/s per cell (that's the number I remember reading) it might end up feeling feel very sluggish if used with our existing internet applications and protocol stack.
Notes and Takeaways from the First 90 Days
Neat, though some of them in old C which would not work with modern compiler.
Well universities are the customers if that makes more sense.
acute vs chronic (disease)

or

acute vs obtuse (angle)

or

acute vs obtuse (comment)?

;)
Before the printing press, access to "knowledge" was through designated privileged members of society -- priests, etc.

Few (if any) "laypeople" did their own research, as you and I understand it today.
My experience is the opposite due to the insane overhead of the spyware^H^H^H antivirus and security services running on our personal devices. Some colleagues successfully applied for MacBooks since these are reasonably fast even while running the security services.
It means you're paying for functionality you're unlikely to use.
What a bunch of drivel. Do not even know what to say.

"predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate."

To me it fucking wildly accurate. It did revolutonize a lot for me. Yes I know some people would get a heart attack if they could not show to the rest of the world what did they have for breakfast. Not my problem. I only had good from the Internet so far.
I mix these 2 up constantly, thanks! :)
How much Python have you ever written or reviewed? With only a bit of experience, I am sure you'd have no trouble doing that if the Python code is not using 2-space indentation.

It certainly becomes a problem if you are looking at a 100+ line method/function, but with Python being as expressive as it is, a 100+ line method/function is a problem unto itself.

Otherwise, I've never had any issues with it — even with languages other than Python, I mostly rely on white space and alignment to understand the block boundaries, only resorting to reviewing the braces carefully when something is amiss.
The tech recruitment industry is a massive scam.

Especially in countries like the UK.

Intercom, once a promising startup, now is basically dead because recruiters destroyed it.

They mismanaged the hiring pipeline and made huge errors by looking at keywords and skipping promising candidates who went elsewhere. Worse yet, it's still going on now.

Unfortunately engineers are not interested in hiring at all so it's a huge problem for companies and recruiters have stepped in.
Ty three-letter agencies. This is why my stealth startup to patriot-wash my clients' internet presence is raking it in rn
As someone with sweet-tooth I don't mind the style, but I do think it masks how empty his arguments are and how unsubstantiated. Explanations that aren't really.

I guess our main disagreement is if he has original ideas. I've only read a couple of things he wrote so I'm certainly not in position to have the definitive opinion, but neither of his articles impressed me.
> LLMs by design are not capable of reason.

It is not as clear cut. The argument being, that the patterns they learn in text encodes several layers of abstraction, one of them being some reasoning, as it is encoded in the discourse.
Why mention AI then?
And that is where the drama is frequently found in the Culture series — when Fluffy the Pet Human meets Spot the Feral Human and disaster ensues.
only suitable for zen no minds (english-japanese pun intended)
Unless internal IT and security teams force running security spyware on personal devices.
People who have struggled to get needed items in the past, or who have lived in poverty and learned how to use whatever is available to fit their needs, may have more of a hoarding propensity. The mindset of seeing an otherwise garbage-bound object, and finding potential utility for its remains means you are less likely to dispose of garbage. In a truly scarce world, you survive with little, but in the current world of abundance you quickly run out of space and then memory of all the stockpiled stuff that could be useful when you really have a use for it.
Do they have colons, or semi-colons?

They seem to have semi-lungs, with a right lung and a vestigial left lung

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Snake-an...
That's sad. Probably you were particularly unfortunate. Though i definitely do know people who echo your sentiment. I'm wondering at what level of education this occurred? A 2nd grade teacher requires a different set of introspection capabilities than a high school calculus teacher than a college world history class. Possibly I'm particularly fortunate but at all levels i have at least had experienced with teachers that had the proper introspection. Emotional introspection and reflection in grade school and high school. And academic introspection and curiosity in high school and college. Certainly there are some bad eggs, but my small state school was rife with professors there for the love of learning. Our learning and theirs.
The TV version was broadcast just over 42 (!) years ago
My workstation runs a local LLM that allows me to ask deeply technical questions in plain English and receive useful, usually highly accurate (95%+ of the time) responses in a few seconds.

It has no memory and requires no Internet access, so I feel generally comfortable interacting with it in a way that I do not when using Google or Facebook - if I randomly ask about drill presses or brownie recipes I will not suddenly be deluged by ads for toolboxes and Ozempic.

This to me is a radically powerful tool, and one that makes me skeptical of the "AI Bust" memes I see on occasion. There may be a lot of dumb money being poured into applying AI to problems it's ill suited for, but the things it is good at is such a positive step-function increase over the old tools that I cannot possibly imagine losing it.
No, Drucker didn't write What Color Is Your Parachute?, that was written by Richard Nelson Bolles (had to look it up, I'd never heard of it before now).
That's normal DNS behavior. If your machine is foo15241.corp.google.com, and you ask DNS for "go", you are supposed to get "go.corp.google.com".
Nice! Something I’ve been noticing lately is that I’ll see something interesting like this, maybe leave a comment or try it out, and tab away and it’s as good as gone, even if I save it to my Telegram saves, or any other list — there’s just so much time-linear content coming in and past my mind that’s very easy to lose again unless something really grabs my attention and energy for a while, and offers something to look forward to tomorrow. Call it ADD or whatever you want, but there is simply too much content / information, even if it’s all useful and good and non-spammy.

Something along the lines of your app could possibly help “de-linearize” (?) things into a daily timeline or mindspace — I think everyone’s become so used to the timeline conditioning that it can be pretty harmful, really. Not sure what to do with all that.
> Tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $1tn on AI capex in coming years,
with so far little to show for it.

Regardless of whether or not the implicit claim here is true (the claim being "all this spend won't produce an ROI"), the explicit claim here is nonsensical.

Of course the $1tn in capex has nothing to show for it! The spend has not happened yet! Of the spend that _has_ happened, most of the chips are not physically in data centers yet. Of the chips that _are_ in data centers, most of the models are not yet trained!

And of the models that _have_ been trained, many have clearly had a significant ROI. GPT-4 cost $100m, and OpenAI's revenue is now reported to be $3.4 billion a year.

Saying there's "little to show for it" is an absurd claim; the products are _printing_ cash! We beat the turing test! You can drive around in a self-driving car!

It's perfectly reasonable to say "where does the ROI come from when you spend $1tn on capex", but it's hard to argue against the success of the spend of the last generation of models.
That's false. It has been shown that LLMs can perform e.g. gradient descent internally [1], which can explain why they are so good at few shot prompting. The universal approximation theorem already tells us that a single layer is sufficient to approximate any function, so it should come as no surprise that modern deep networks with many layers should be able to perform iterative optimisations.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559
Thus the rise of Eco-fascism begins! Last year I wrote a piece on Ted Kacsynski's passing. To summarize 6000 words - some decent ideas, absolute mad man who did more harm than good for his cause, I REALLY hope that folks don't emulate his actions. I deeply fear that with peaceful protest being outlawed in places, violent protest become inevitable.

This is something that Garrett Hardin was writing about in the 1960-80's. 'Tragedy of the Commons', 'Lifeboat Ethics' and 'Filters against folly' are all works of his worth studying as it shines a spot light on the ugly side of humanity and our impacts.

This unfortunately lead to him adopting a lot of anti-immigration stances and some downright racist ideas. It is an a damn shame considering he had a real knack for cutting through the crap and highlighting some of the bigger long terms issues of our behaviors.

I really hope we don't go down this path, but everyday it looks like we are slowly taking another step there. May we live in interesting times.
To me those seem like to sides of the same coin. LLMs are fundamentally trained to complete text. The training just tries to find the most effective way to do that within the given model architecture and parameter count.

Now if we start by "LLMs ingest huge amounts of text", then a simple model would complete text by simple memorization. But correctly completing "234 * 452 =" is a lot simpler to do by doing math than by having memorized all possible multiplications. Similarly, understanding the world and being able to reason about it helps you correctly completing human-written sentences. Thus a sufficiently well-trained model that has enough parameters to do this but not so many that it simply overfits should be expected to develop some reasoning ability.

If you start with "the training set contains a lot of reasoning" you can get something that looks like reasoning in the memorization stage. But the same argument why the model would develop actual reasoning still works and is even stronger: if you have to complete someone's argument that's a lot easier if you can follow their train of thought.
Within large tech companies AI projects (often just features within existing products) are seen as the safe place to be while non-AI projects have higher layoff rates.

I wonder how much of the AI spend is driven by the above situation.
Package management is a fundamentally hard problem, and it's not all technical.

Nowadays, before I try anything new, I mentally reserve one or two days for the inevitable problems with configuring, compiling and installing. Also, it happens regularly that the cost of trying something turns out to be too high, and I just move on to the next thing.

Of course, sometimes stuff works out of the box, but that is only in a small fraction of cases.

It is sad that it has come to this, and it makes me wonder how we'll cope in a future when software has even more layers of complexity.
Probably because Apple recently announced their Private Cloud Compute based on their own hardware that is being used to handle any Apple Intelligence features that don’t run on device.
Pretty sure that’s what they’re saying
And my follow-up to the "unwrapping isn't evil" section: https://blog.burntsushi.net/unwrap/
I didn't say they had the same taste (though they're way closer than basil and oregano.) The question is whether the ancient Cilantro recipes that the article posits became Italian Parsley recipes.

Subtlety gets evened out by different preparation techniques. IMHO, when used raw, finely chopped Italian Parsley is at least as intense as coarsely chopped Cilantro.
The astronaut in the photo should learn to tuck his pant legs into his boots, especially in a vacuum.
Presumably you'd have moments of contact and separation where strategy and policy are communicated. I don't see any impression this is a replacement for executives.
As long as they refund people it's all good.

Would of been nice for them to open source the SDK too.
Your analysis could be applied to Creo without much change because you're looking at implicit incentives in any place managers (or resource-controllers) are expected to accomplish goals.

That said, I think your analysis is a bit weakened by a moral elements (good managers vs bad managers). And even more, it's not necessarily bad for an organization to have locally controlled resources. One can posit an omniscient central controller that would manage resources better than local managers but it's likely that there are limits to both central controllers and local managers. What's "best" depends on the task, the organization and who's judging the result.
Very interesting. Wonder what does building an aircraft carrier fleet say about China's military priorities. Are they more focused on occupying Taiwan, or on keeping the Malacca Straight open for commerce, or on power projection across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
For me at Columbia Gopher was almost completely gone, although the university's public terminals still used it for the intranet. I used pine for email only, preferring trn for netnews. (I would soon switch to Emacs VM for email and slrn for Usenet, both of which I still use today.) I used X Window terminals, but even there most use was the above via xterm. Netscape was horribly unreliable and slow whether via X or on PCs/Macs; the fact that we used it at all regardless shows how immediately and obviously compelling the web was.
It sounds like the users visiting this site are there to watch YouTube videos
> there may be an entropic blockade to stimulating life:

Interesting.-

PS. Taking this further, there might be a similar "blockade" to simulating intelligence. Or (definitely) consciousness ...
I don't understand why we don't make the aesthetic aspects of syntax (e.g. block delimitation) to be a feature of the editor rather than the source of truth for the code. For all unix profited from text I think we have the tooling necessary to move our storage and editors beyond it, and it's been obvious the entire time it comes with non-trivial liability converting to and from more reliably structured representations.
because COVID was no more severe than flu, not airborne Ebola that everyone at the time pretended it was.
The Roman Army also left a lot of decision power to their lower levels, at least on a tactical level. They most definitely were not a democracy in the modern sense.
This was called the AARD code:

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

And it was Geoff Chappell, not Andew Shulman. Shulman helped write it up for publication.

https://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/archive/aard/ind...
The state's residential water use is around 15%. The top line-items in the remaining are dairy (for raising alfalfa and thirsty cows) and almonds.
The reason for so much theft is because of poverty. People can't afford to live, police can't solve that issue
Ah, the Great Firewall of Corporate America.
It almost never snows where I live. It's pretty remote, 4 roads in, 4 roads out of town. Hundreds of miles to a big city.

Anyway, like 6 or 7 years ago there was a freakish huge snowstorm. Dumped feet of snow. Collapsed some roofs in town (including an auto dealership which was a sight). The county doesn't keep snow plowing equipment (and who could justify the expense given how much it snows here?).

Anyway, it shut down the roads for days. No way to leave. The stores were nearly empty. It was pretty wild and eye opening.

This is only one of many things that can happen. Fires, floods, other "acts of God" to say nothing of potential acts of other humans. A lot of things can happen and suddenly everything you depend on no longer works. It can happen, and it can happen where you live too.

Eventually the government may be able to fix things, but they aren't magic either, even when they are competent and motivated to actually help. I helped clean up from a major hurricane once, the military took over. Everything. Distributing water, cleaning up the streets, directing traffic. And it seemed they did reasonably well but it takes a bit to set all that up and assumes the tragedy is local enough help will be able to organize and come in from outside.

Now, I'm not suggesting going full survivor. Surviving years of nuke fallout and zombie apocalypse probably isn't reasonable for most people.

But in my opinion if you aren't prepping to stay alive (food, water, heat, personal protection and a way to get communications with no power) for a week or two, and maybe up to a month or two in case of emergency you are being short sighted and taking unnecessary risk.