skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People outside of tech seem to think that AI creation is just "fat finger a prompt -> take output and claim to be an artist on the interwebs"

Probably because that's the predominant experience of people encountering AI art on the Internet. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people out there using AI to do interesting things, but like with basically every technology, the vast, vast majority of the output you're going to see is people who see a labor saving device that can make doing... something, at scale, brain-dead easy. Be that generating shitty coloring books and selling them to overworked parents, generating shitty books on niche, dumb topics like the crystal healing woo shit and selling them to uncritical audiences, or just generating page upon page of boring, shitty artwork and uploading it to DeviantArt and paywalling it.

And that's just individuals. Many online businesses are actively enshittifying themselves too, adding AI generated content alongside (or in place of) human created content. On the note of DeviantArt, they built an AI generator into the damn site so people can fill it with even more low-effort garbage than was already getting uploaded. And of course Google now headlines your search results with a shitty LLM summary that runs the gamut between "dull, uninteresting summary of somewhat relevant information" to "complete nonsense that actively endangers lives" while also depriving even more websites of even more traffic that gave them whatever information in the first place.

Like, again, I have no problem envisioning some people and some orgs some place are doing interesting stuff with this tech. However I cannot overemphasize how utterly, completely, totally dog-shit my experience personally has been with it and how harshly I now tend to judge any project parading around AI integration. I'm open to being wrong... but I'm usually not.

There was that Vaudeville game that made the rounds that I felt was at least trying to do something interesting with LLMs, but like... the tech just wasn't there yet. You're talking to characters and can say basically whatever you want, and then an LLM generates an answer based on the context of that character and it's read back to you by text-to-speech. It's... neat? For like ten minutes, and then you're just playing a detective game with impressively bad writing and zero-effort VO, and the fact that the entire game was built of pre-built, unchanged assets made it feel incredibly cheap and low-effort. The only thing it's really good for is as streamer fodder, weird garbage for people to overreact to and fuck with for an audience.
OpenAI Names Political Veteran Chris Lehane as Head of Global Policy
https://archive.ph/8cpGj
There's an advantage to pure hydrogen vs. synthetic hydrocarbons, the lack of carbon means no greenhouse gas production when you use it.
Is there a P2P file transfer program that doesn't require any Internet connection, even for establishing the handshake ?
Supporting working open source implementations of software that are already part of your ecosystem, lol, crazy, right. /s
Sure, I just think that’s being pedantic.
I was just going to post a comment similar to this. We've swung towards walled gardens of piles of content instead of graphs of individually curated links.

Exactly that "surfing" or "webring" or "stumbleupon" style of actually browsing in a larger content rather than searching or push-promote within that pile of content.
I am not in Ireland and not an expert on this but I often find that there are simple loopholes when there are restrictions on what can be installed. In this case I think they should look at avoiding "installing" anything at all and look for temporary things employees could bring themselves such as quick deployment tents, pads and sleeping bags. Expense all of that as morale, recreation and welfare gear. All that would need to be installed are tall+wide lockers. Have drills / exercises where all the tents and sleeping bags have to be git stashed in the tall+wide lockers within 10 minutes. There are modern tents that can be set up and taken down in less than a minute now. This also leaves the floor open to any activity.

Inspector shows up, they find an empty floor with lockers and a Foosball table or whatever is popular in Ireland these days. Have access badge requirements for that room and the floor to buy time. Put a sensitive server in the room to justify it such as the movie server for the projector that is next to the Guinness fountain. Maybe put in some weights and call it "The Gym". I miss my Irish coworkers.
That's a great idea, thanks! Will add it to the list. My goal is to keep as simple as possible, so will think of ways of doing that without introducing complexity.
It's refreshing to see a science fiction writer underplay the capabilities of AI, but if anyone can speak to the nuances and implications of generative AI on art and writing it's probably someone like Ted Chiang.

We can debate his generalized definition of art as making creative choices that carry subjective, intentional, and performative value for human beings (and therefore LLMs fall short of this), but I think he makes a couple strong points nonetheless:

1. The argument others like François Chollet have also made, that we have yet to see any AI systems capable of exhibiting intelligence beyond stylistic mimicry or forming generalized knowledge about concepts from large data sets.

2. The subjective experience of human interaction is valuable and desirable, and will remain so in the face of increasingly capable models, not because they won't be able to compete in producing inspiring art or enjoyable fiction, but because of the inherent primacy of human intentionality and experience.
In (at least) one of Iain Banks’ Culture books, he says that technological progress is not a ladder, but a rock face. The tech which a species develops depends a lot on the conditions of their evolution, and encountering wildly different techs that seem miraculous or incomprehensible to one’s own species is fairly common.

I think of “intelligence” in a similar vein. We can recognize it when it’s close enough in proximity to the path we humans have taken. The further away another species is from that, the less we are able to recognize/judge their level of intelligence. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes the limits of our own abilities to understand vey foreign things. That’s not to say that we could never get better at it, but there will almost certainly always be more outside of our circle of understanding than inside it.

I’m also reminded of the drunk searching for his house key beneath a street light. It’s not where he dropped the key, but he’s searching there because “that’s where the light is.”
No I disagree, what are you even refering to? What are these particular actions?, curiously we never refer to russian actions as anti-ukrainian, anti-polish, anti-european. Its always the other way round.
Is bcachefs-tools going into the mainline distros or into something that’s meant to be less stable and experimental? Linus makes it sound like there’s a more appropriate place for this work.

Edit: Reading through the thread, it seems like there is a claim of rigorous but effectively private testing. Without the ability to audit those results easily it’s causing a lot of worry.
"They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence."

Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion.

First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so.

Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that.

Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them.

If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.
Then don't log the noise. Every log gets filled with noise if you aren't careful about choosing what to log.
The market for Art is very small. For the vast amount of visual content some generic AI placeholder is entirely sufficient. Won’t end up in an art gallery but it also doesn’t need to.
This is an amusingly ignorant article. Its initial argument, that AI tools don't produce art because they offer meaningfully fewer knobs and dials to creators than a camera, is a classic example of mistaking the contingent for the essential. Those knobs and dials do exist. Download a copy of Stable Diffusion and see all the things you can tweak, iteratively, using the same seed, to work towards an image you desire. The same applies for text.

As it happens I have been using Claude quite extensively as a drafting partner over the past few months for writing a novel. I enjoy plotting, planning and editing, but not drafting, so I let it do the zeroth draft for me. It has been quite a productive arrangement.
ssh -w sets up a network interface

ssh -w -N sets up a network interface and does not run a shell

It still runs over TCP, so it's not ideal. TCP-over-TCP is a recognized antipattern that causes extra retransmissions, wasted bandwidth and delays.
Because the definition of 'art' is somewhat philosophical, the more salient question is "will AI make something indistinguishable from art?" and the answer is easy: yes.
> You sound very unhinged, I'm afraid to say.

Haha, maybe.

> More like an activist than ... well ... a normal well-adjusted person.

What then am I an activist for exactly? Rust for Linux and better package managers? If you think "activism" is my aim after reading my comment, I think you missed my point.

The point is -- I can't stand Drew's writing. And the reason why is not because he expresses strong opinions which I don't share, it's because -- Drew doesn't ever consider the possibility he's wrong. Even as a nodding feint to the reader that acknowledges intellectual humility is something we all expect. So, I will accept, in that limited space, I'm an activist. I am an activist for Drew writing better.

Do you really need another example of Drew's lack of intellectual curiosity? Well...

One might read Drew's "Rust is not a good C replacement"[0], and think wait a minute, Drew does actually collect some evidence there that Rust is adopting more features per year than C, Go or even C++. Yes, I'll admit Drew occasionally collects the worst evidence to make bad points.

Drew concludes: "[This prevalence of features] speaks volumes to the stability of these languages, but more importantly it speaks to their complexity. Over time it rapidly becomes difficult for one to keep an up-to-date mental map of Rust and how to solve your problems idiomatically." And this conclusion might be a reasonable inference to draw after one has worked with Rust over a year or so, and one can provide some examples of certain redundant or complex behavior, but Drew doesn't do that. He takes some information, which could be relevant, provides it out of any context, and simply moves on.

I'd note there is still no evidence Drew has ever even tried Rust in any of Drew's writing. He just doesn't like it from afar!

Or perhaps Drew could have provided an example of a feature that wasn't a good feature from the year of this blog entry (2019)? No, that might have required him to wrestle with his point a little, and that would be hard! As Drew says, "My approach wasn’t very scientific, but I’m sure the point comes across", failing to understand his superficial approach is exactly the problem with his writing, and this point.

His bullets in support are similarly facile. As Drew says: "C has a spec. No spec means there’s nothing keeping rustc honest. Any behavior it exhibits could change tomorrow." Left unremarked upon by Drew is how much of C's spec leaves C's behavior undefined, compared to the implementation defined behavior Rust, because that wouldn't serve to celebrate C and flog Rust. So we don't get the ordinary hemming and hawing one often sees in good writing ("It could be like this, but I think it's more like this..."). Instead, we get black and white. Heroes and villains.

[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/25/Rust-is-not-a-good-C-repl...
For an essay that hinges on the notion that “art requires making choices,” I wish the author had chosen to delve a bit more into the question of what choosing is. Do humans really make choices? If so, how free are those choices? Is there something about human choice that will never be convincingly imitated by computer? If so, what is it, and how do you know it cannot be imitated?
Mostly just highlighting how misinformed the author is. AI art tools are very much able to adjust small details
It's very clear from that thread that he doesn't understand the purpose of the stable branch. It doesn't mean "stable" as in "the best possible experience", it means it as in "this code has been tested for a long period of time with no serious defects found" so that when the stable branch is promoted to release, everything has undergone a long testing period by a broad user base.

If there is a defect found, the change to a stable branch should literally be the minimal code change to fix the reported issue. Ideally, if it's a newly introduced issue (i.e. since being on the stable branch), the problematic code reverted and a different fix to the original defect applied instead (or left if it's deemed less of an issue than taking another speculative fix). Anything that requires a re-organisation of code, by definition, isn't a minimal fix. Maybe it's the correct long-term solution, but that can be done on the unstable branch, but for the stable branch, the best fix is the simplest work around. If there isn't a simple work around, the best fix is to revert everything back to the previous stable version and keep iterating on the unstable branch.

The guy even admits it as well with his repeated "please don't actually use this in production" style messages - it's hard to give a greater indication than this that the code isn't yet ready for stable.

I can understand why from his perspective he wants his changes in the hands of users as soon as possible - it's something he's poured his heart and soul and he strongly believes it will improve his users' experience. It's also the case that he is happy running the very latest and probably has more confidence in it that an older version. The rational choice from his perspective is to always use the latest code. But, discounting the extremely unlikely situation that his code is entirely bug free, that just means he hasn't yet found the next serious bug. If a big code change is rushed out into the stable branch, it just increases the likelihood that any serious bug won't have the time it needs in testing to have the confidence that's the branch is suitable for promotion to release.
> I would rather something not be packaged at all than packaged badly; this whole experience reads like a lesson in what not to do.

You might consider adding a big warning on your official documentation about unsupported distribution packages.

Add links to relevant issue tracker/bug reports or mailing list discussions saying until So and so issue are resolved, the official statement is that distribution package is unsupported, not recommended and deemed dangerous to use.

This is as much leverage as you can have with the distribution community. Then wait for them to upstream patches and attempt to fix the issues. Accept fixes as you consider appropriate or not.

It's also important to at least respect the distribution's opinions in regards to having only one version of a library's major release . Just respect and understanding, you don't have to agree.

Also, all the problematic libs cited by the packager are 0.x.x numbered which sounds like a very young and immature ecosystem of dependencies. Of course, this is bound to cause pain to packagers. I think this speaks volumes about the high level of interest for bcachefs, that they actually tried to make it work instead of not bothering.
> They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing

for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka
Perhaps you just feel that way because it's made by a machine. Would need some double blind experiment really, preferably with people who don't know the 'style' of these models.
Right, you can’t turn a mutable object into an immutable object when other references to the mutable interface already exists. Const as in C/C++ is certainly a useful feature that Java lacks, but it’s quite a leap from that to claiming that Java doesn’t support true immutability. I develop Java applications with immutability as the default, and it works quite well. The lack of the abive-mentioned feature is not a critical obstacle.

Regarding your point about collection views, const references are often also just views on mutable objects, and this poses no particular difficulty. And you can implement truly immutable collections in Java if you really insist on it.
No, it's not clear, thats my fundamental point. It's actually misinformation.

They call it a feature to create unique, random email addresses.... Email Addresses are for two-way communication.

If I tell you here is a device you use for instant messages. And you ask me, hey how do I send someone a message using this device? I tell you, you can't. That's because you are holding a PAGER.
The problem with this article is that presupposes that the technology will remain the same and in its current state id agree it isn’t art

- but even assuming the rate of advancement slows down, eventually it will be making Art…
Clear shape of a bubble? What are your thoughts?
I encountered it at Activision a few years ago.
Thanks! I'll research the best open-source license options to enable you to build whatever you want without limitations!
A classic Honey Badger Meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg
Humans are not metaphysically special entities, any more than the Earth is a special planet.
This is such an useful set of links! thank you!
Same. I don't know if I would call myself an artist, despite creating art for... Jesus, most of my life at this point, and making a bit of cash off it, at least enough to cover the power bill each month. I went into programming because I was keenly aware of how hard it is to make a living as an artist (and getting harder all the time!) but like... I simply cannot fathom enjoying "prompt engineering" nearly as much as my current creative processes.

I've used AI generators a few times because they're interesting little toys, but fundamentally, a creative process is literally thousands of not millions of tiny decisions that are informed by other decisions. If anything, that's what I would call an "artist's voice" in any given creative product, is an at least somewhat consistent through-line through those decisions that gives the final piece the "life" that is so clearly missing from AI art, because all those millions of decisions, instead of being made by one or a few "voices," if you will, is replaced by millions of weighted-average decisions designed to reduce "error" in the product. It's quite literally soulless and people pick up on this, no matter how much the AI lovers want to scream Luddite at me, it's true.

That's not to say it's completely without purpose, I think this stuff is going to do gangbusters for corporate news pieces, blogs, spam sites, etc. If you want royalty free imagery to use for a thing, and don't give much of a shit about what it is, AI can handle that quite well. But I simply can't fathom someone with an intention, who wants to say something with an art piece using AI much, if at all.
I'm not that familiar with bcachefs-tools and was speaking more generally but I thought bcachefs-tools wasn't critical for normal booting (On Ubuntu 24.04 nothing seems to depend on that package and it seems optional. The same for btrfs-tools). Some other comments suggested you need it to mount a degraded file system but it seems to me that is a case where either 1. your system can't boot and you need external recovery boot tools anyway or 2. you can boot and can run whatever tools you want (you can install the latest version of bcachefs-tools via nixpkgs for example). The real problem there seems to be that the program was silently broken due to the changes made to get it to build on Debian.

Though I agree that it is closer to a system-critical package than most packages.
> It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those.

That’s how you design generic appliances, not professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it’s not for people that use their computers as computers (making it do pretty much everything).
Can someone tell me what ideas of Wolfram have had an impact on mathematics & physics as a discipline? Every time I read his posts, without understanding them deeply, his accomplishments seem insane, to the point that I would expect everyone to talk about them - yet I have never heard anyone other than himself talk about them.
I still use this for private family group chat and it’s such a fantastic piece of software. It’s really in a league of its own with all the features it has. I was heart broken when Zoom ate them up and shit them out like a proper American ~~business~~ anti-competitive tumor.
Yes and I don't use it but he is forced to respond to court orders :)
I should have posted the original source. My apologies for the oversight.

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-dps-surveillance-tangle-...
Related: Why it’s mathematically impossible to share fair[0] (Stand-up Maths aka Matt Parker).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVhFBujPlVo
Something I've had in the back of my mind is that gen AI has enabled a new generation of outsider artists. That's all. It has lowered the barriers to entry for creativity so much that a whole host of people who have had no formal training or dialogue with Real Artists are able to jump in and just make things they want to see. No surprise their creations are ugly or bad or soulless or weird by conventional standards; that's the norm for outsider art
Oh of course not, they're not accompanied by 5 paragraph essays about what they mean.
I think people confuse the Fortran bug that didn't lose a rocket with the Ada bug that did lose a rocket (the Ariane 5), like how people thinking Nelson Mandela died in prison in the '80s probably got mixed up with Steve Biko.
For me it’s solely the former even if the marketing/press around it hypes up the latter
FYI The classical Borland text user inteface (TUI) framework used in Turbo Pascal and other terminal MS-DOS editors is open source.

Turbo Vision: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
Yes. Almost as humbling as the market…

I feel like w. coyote, looking both ways before crossing the train track, and then getting run over anyway, when I try to cross, after seeing no train coming.

There is no risk in creating a one time password…

But, yes we’ll atleast temporarily remove the login wall probably.
I didn't miss that part of the quote. And no it would make no difference to Otellini or to the discussion in this thread because he also didn't know the estimate was wrong when he made the decision.