skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beautiful read!

*Personal side story with death of a bird in my hand

I must have been 10-12 years old, was playing on the street in front of my house. I noticed an injured bird was crying for help. I ran to it, lifted it in my hand to see what happened. It was clearly dying, I ran home and got some water. I gave it some water and it quickly drank as much as it could. While I was holding it in my hand, it looked at me with big round eyes and took its last breath. I could feel something leave its body and I felt it in my hand. I remember this often what it saw before dying, what was it thinking before dying.
LLMs are not fundamentally non-deterministic. It's trivial to do e.g. greedy sampling generation.
Which is exciting, except for the fact that this much computing power is useless on a phone. You can't even do 'real' multitasking, and your applications are incredibly limited.
reproducibility isn't just on your deployments, it's for development too. got old REAL fast when your fancy build doesn't work the same on every devs device or some one off issue with how your dev has setup their environment steals hours from everyone.

it was a big reason why we moved to containers at the bare minimum, because its quick and easy to spin up and destroy and you are guaranteed what runs locally runs on prod. no more "well it worked on my system!".
I actually beg to differ, most people who go into STEM for example have a pretty good understanding of their path and they are very smart 18 year olds who make really good decisions, but I agree that mortgages shouldn’t be like candies giving them to any kid. I agree that If banks were worried of not getting payed back, then maybe they would screen better, but still the issue of universities with bad incentives still remains there.
I have not really been a fan of ChatGPT quality. But even if that were not an issue, it is kinda hard to ask ChatGPT to write a script and a test suite for something that falls under export control and/or ITAR, or even just plain old commercial restrictions.
As with other industries, there is a steady increase in demand but not enough supply. Make it easier for accredited universities to be setup and let the free market forces drive the cost of an undergraduate degree down.
Cats have an instinct to find a place to hide, often far away, when near death. They live socially, and do this so that if a predator found the corpse it wouldn't jeopardize the rest of the colony.

I keep hearing stories about cats who "ran away and never came back". When a cat of mine grew old, despite being deaf, blind, and quite possibly addled with feline dementia, she would get up on shaky paws and try to find a nice well-concealed corner to hide in while awaiting the reaper. We eventually had her put to sleep, but I think we might've waited too long.
I agree with a lot of what you wrote. And I too find it surprising how people often downplay animal sentience and awareness, and capacity for suffering. There is ample evidence of these in primates, cetaceans, birds such as corvids, and domestic animals like dogs and cats.

But killing a large animal, like a cow, by hand using a knife is hardly "humane" or "unavoidable". The slaughtered animal would experience severe pain and awareness of its situation before it eventually loses consciousness.
That's the first step to regulate artificial intelligence or LLM market.

Enjoy free and open model like lama or mistral while it lasts because openai and Google has way enough money to lobby politicians.

Personally I find that the idea of LLM being dangerous is laughable, there is nothing llm are going to give you that Google or bing can't already.

That's just 101 on killing entrepreneurship and competition in a free market, regulate it until only the big one can be part of it.
The difference is that we know the fundamentalists are wrong because their beliefs solidly run up against known facts. I am suggesting that filling the gaps one way (even though it feels more rational) is as irrational as filling the gaps any other way.

And we know very little about the mind. We know a lot about the brain. As far as the exact links between mind and brain, that is still quite a bit up in the air.
Wait, are there really 36 Hacker News users in North Korea? The map just refreshes if I check that, but it seems kinda unbelievable given how isolated the country is and how heavily monitored the folks living there are.

Either way, had a bit of trouble adding myself due to the tool expecting this data to be the only thing in the user's bio. Could it be updated to check if the text exists anywhere at all? Because quite a few people here will want to discuss their side projects and startups first, not start off with a random block of tags.
In fairness, anyone trying to convince me of any given fact of authorship could do well by leaving the bright red shirt and braces combo in the wardrobe.
Basically I've been playing billards all my life. Never really got better, playing at the same level for years. Meaning that getting more than two or three balls at one go was a rarity.

Until one day when I stopped looking at the white when playing a shot and instead I started looking at the target ball. It's weird that it took me so long to make that little change but it completely changed my skill level.

Something else I realised was that the less time I think about a shot the better the shot comes. As you said, it's a very mental game.

And I realised that it's all about placement: where do I want the white to be after playing a ball into the pocket.
Let me guess, it wasn't Egyptology degree
I need that kind of power, not for apps, but computational photography and videography.
The Ethereum DAO rollback fork was (for better or worse) widely supported by the community. It's not likely that a court-ordered fork to reassign Satoshi's coins to Wright would have anywhere near the same level of support.
You misunderstand the point people saying this make. They know governments can suppress their freedoms ultimately but since Bitcoin is an open and public system, the measures governments have to use to "kill" it force them to limit very fundamental freedoms (like freedom of speech to restrict the publishing of its source code, freedom to consume the energy citizens purchase and/or produce how they want, neutral access to Internet, etc.).

These kind of measures are political suicide in Western democracies, hence why politicians are seen as powerless against Bitcoin in these places, why they "let" this market grow and why they just setup ways to tax it as best as they can (at the borders between fiat and crypto).

In places where preserving such freedoms is not a burden for governments you already see bans flourish when it is convenient for the people in power... but even then, it just marginally stops the actual access to Bitcoin as a network participant (which is not limited to mining). It doesn't actually kills Bitcoin.

But everyone knows that if governments around the world decided to install massive censorship, invade the privacy of all their citizen, and magically all were in agreement to do so at the same time, Bitcoin wouldn't survive... if you think this is a possible scenario, is Bitcoin really the thing your should worry about?
Black swans and the Lindy Effect both play here. Sometimes hitting big with an startup more than compensate the loss of the failed ones. And odds of staying out increases with surviving time. It is not totally random that this happens, but maybe for a lot it could be only noticeable on hindsight.
I have about about 80TB (my wife's data and mine) backed up to LTO5 tape. It's pretty cheap to get refurb tape drives on ebay. I pay about $5.00/TB for tape storage, not including the ~$200 for the LTO drive and an HBA card, so it was pretty economical.
If everyone else can hallucinate along with it then problem solved.
I use the same heuristic for when I should switch from shell to Python :-). Arrays (especially associative ones, at least for me) are a good indication that a more advanced language like Python might be more appropriate than shell.
If tariffs simply fix the price difference between the cost of materials-dumping that is happening in certain industries where China has over-invested to help properly balance the global economy, it will not be massively inflationary; it’s just a defensive move against attacks on western manufacturing centers.
No, i mean EU socialist countries. To the tune of Sweden, Netherlands, etc. That are little but sleepy retirement community with no ways to make money. Why would anyone with any ambition want to live there? So they don't. They go to America in spite of all it's horrors and sins. Live there once they made they money? Also no, because taxes, they go to the likes of Cyprus or Malta, or since recently, Spain [1]. These countries are good only if you are a taker, or a tourist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckham_law
I also strongly dislike X being used as the primary host of public information not because of any moral disagreements with the company, but because of how inaccessible it's becoming.

Information should be accessible to anyone anywhere on any device, with or without an account. X doesn't fit that role.

Same reason I hate when companies have a Facebook page and nothing else.
> In an ideal world, you'd nail your FS design first try, make no mistakes during implementation and call it a day

Crypto implementations and FS implementations strike me as the ideal audience for actually investing the mental energy in the healthy ecosystem we have of modeling and correctness verification systems

Now, I readily admit that I could be talking out of my ass, given that I've not tried to use those verification systems in anger, as I am not in the crypto (or FS) authoring space but AWS uses formal verification for their ... fork? ... of BoringSSL et al https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lc-verification#aws-libcrypto...
I wonder how long it took for each of the responses it gave
The amount of cities called "white city" around here is annoying to, but at least they have the decency to be spelled differently.
True, I should’ve stipulated the right 1%. Those orchestrating the cartel coyotes, etc.
if it is full of preservatives, yes. Obviously, just frozen vegetables isn’t ultra processed.
It's not normal to have this in australia - these are probably scholarships.

Australia has similar loan system for tertiary education.
> Can you provide an objective measure of probability as to whether nothingness is what awaits you after death?

Yes, with some effort, I can start at a default 50:50 and incorporate all the evidence we have access to. The resulting number will be pretty high and as objective as a person can reasonably be asked to be.

> nobody can assign a probability to an unknown unknown

Giving up like that is not a way to make rational decisions.

Also when you have a very precise scenario and question, doesn't that make it a known unknown?

> Wanting to avoid that change is almost definitionally due to a fear of the unknown. You are afraid that the new state you will be in will be worse for lack of those memories.

Wrong. Even with a guaranteed blissful existence, I'm still busy using my consciousness on my current life and don't want it to end.

> it is in fact a common trauma response to block out old, bad memories.

Yeah a few of them, that's not remotely the same as a clean slate.
Can turn the chip off faster to save power probably.
please regulate our competitors
Maybe time for getting synth minds from guessing to reason.
Cheese is a processed food, class 3. "Cheese products" like Kraft and Velveeta are class four ultra processed given the additives and way it's broken down and reformed.
Yes, that is why increasing tariffs and using that savings to subsidize automation in the US is the correct policy.
Not with 8GB of RAM
The education-politician complex as we know it will face a dramatic reckoning in the next few years. Many mid-tier universities are likely to go under.

Perhaps, as a society, we will rethink how education is attained. In a world shaped by AI, maybe kids will take MOOCs just for fun.
640k ought to be enough for anybody, huh?
Factor is a concatenative, stack-based programming language with high-level features including dynamic types, extensible syntax, macros, and garbage collection. On a practical side, Factor has a full-featured library, supports many different platforms, and has been extensively documented.
I was able to add myself even though I have another unrelated sentence in my bio. But I think the tool fails to show my interests.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare a workflow that is designed for sed/awk. It’s about 10 lines of python to run my command and capture stdout/stderr - the benefit of which is that I can actually read it. What happens if you want to retry a line if it fails?
I just don't understand why the guy claiming he is the creator and main programmer of a cutting edge anti-establishment crypto asset, would present himself as a suit and tie wearing business man who drinks champagne.

Like wtf is going on.
In this case, government intervention is what caused the problem, and removing that intervention is what would disrupt the multi-million dollar industry.

Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.

The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate, and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable tuition, etc.
This is probably the first time I've seen a diacritics/text-encoding problem created by a French developer, rather than us French folks complaining about US-centric language decisions!

If you want anybody on HN to access, you might want accept-language to be set to an asterisk `*`.

Good luck and I hope we can someday meet up if I'm in Toulouse!
That covers most people.
> a % of your income for a fixed period of time

why not a % until the cost of the degree is paid back? Why does there have to be a forgiveness component?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#/media/File:Li...
These kind of measures are political suicide in Western democracies

CSAM has entered the chat. ("Why do you support child abuse, Senator?")
I like the idea of openscad and sometimes use it, but the fact that it is no good for producing drawings suitable for machinists or 2d CAM programs is too much of a limitation. I wish someone would extend the idea to be more universally useful. Also, I wish I could afford for that someone to be me.
Many years ago I went to university in the uk. Entry required good grades but tuition was free and there was a reasonable grant to live on.

Twenty or so years ago the grant became a loan and, more recently, tuition fees were introduced.

Nowadays way more people go to uni but come out saddled with debt.

Presumably the incentives are the same as described in the article for the US: the uni wants as many students as possible because they get tuition fees and short term the administrators don’t care about graduation rate or job outcomes because it will be on some future administrators watch when the feedback loop stops new undergrads joining?
A collection of tartan patterns as SVG
I clarified in a another post I mean for benchmarking standalone models, not ones fine-tuned for solving ARC
“Lost” was just typical J.J. Abrahams mystery-box spitballing. I gave up halfway into the first season because I thought no way this is going to have any coherent resolution.
Using geotagged facial expressions to characterize groups emotion in theme parks
Washington established the presidency. How much of it would he recognize now?
Rory Sutherland – Are We Now Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? – Nudgestock 2024 [video]
Maybe, it's time for the bubble to burst.
Teaching as in school teachers? In the US? Not even close to being well paid.
I... already do all that on my iPhone 12 Pro, and people have been doing that for a while now.

For anything truly groundbreaking... Apple has too locked down of a system. And I say it as a long time fanboy
"with even the latest tools the effort put in to get the model to produce useful output is still some multiple (but not an enormous multiple now, say 2x to 5x) of the effort needed to properly prompt and verify the output. However, I see no reason to prevent this ratio from falling below 1x in a few years, which I think could be a tipping point for broader adoption of these tools in my field"

Given the log scale on compute to improve performance, it is not a guarantee that the ratio can be improved so much in a few years
Sorry, I interpreted the term "accept" in your post to mean that you were attempting to use metaphors/analogies as your argument (the argument itself being the only thing that can be accepted/rejected).
I do. I can almost do my entire knowledge worker job from the phone. My 14 is getting slowed down by iOS Microsoft Office enhancements, so hopefully the 16 can make me just as productive as I was last year.
> Who's fault it is that they are dumb?

They are young. And therefore there is an asymmetry in information.
They stopped the one child policy nine years ago; they had it in the first place because demographic projections had them severely overpopulated if they didn't.

During the period in which it was active, their GDP increased by a factor of about 62. Not percentage, multiple.
Just because people identify with some religion or other doesn't mean they believe whatever thing that religion says about death.
> some finance goons' ponzi scheme

If you mean banks, there’s the problem that “let it die” often translates to “shift the obligation”, which typically gets shifted to the tax payers, either in plain sight after a bailout, or under the table by devaluing the currency (basically taxation without having to say it).
You could create a cooling, charging dock for that purpose with an HDMI or DP out. Hell, you could put it in the base of the monitor even. It's definitely feasible for a company like Apple and I could see a market for it in the corporate space.
The novelty to me is that the “The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student.” in so many subject areas! I have found great value in using LLMs to sort things out. In areas where I am very experienced it can be really helpful at tons of small chores. Like Terrence was pointing out in his third experiment — if you break the problem down it does solid work filling in smaller blanks. You need the conceptual understanding. Part of this is prompting skill. If you go into an area you don’t know you have to try and build the prompts up. Dive into something small and specific and work outward if the answer is known. Start specific and focused if starting from the outside in. I have used this to cut through conceptual layers of very complex topics I have zero knowledge in and then verify my concepts via experts on YT/research papers/trusted sources. It is an amazing tool.
If you copy something, by definition, it is not the same file. It is a copy of the file not the original file.

If you copy a Van Gogh is it worth the same as the original?
When I graduated in the UK in 2006, I had to pay an extra £3000 because I graduated.
How many apple trees are visible in this photo of an Idaho forest? https://www.planetware.com/wpimages/2020/08/idaho-best-natio...

Ceteris paribus, normal trees will always outcompete fruit trees because they don't have to waste any energy on fruit, and use that instead on trunk height, putting fruit trees in their shade and, eventually, starving them to death.

You can, of course, maintain an orchard of fruit trees, manually removing competitor species, but then we're talking about stationary farming, a technology that Plains Indians did not have ten thousand years ago.
How the ram is actually managed in the firmware can make the 8 GB number not entirely illuminating.

Now, this is the case for software graphics, but it might not be the case for LLMs.
I have a 22TB RAID10 system out in my detached garage that works as an "off-site" backup server for all my other systems. It stays off most of the time. It's on when I'm backing up data to it, or if it's running backups to LTO tape. Or it's on when I'm out in the garage doing whatever project, I use it to play music and look up stuff on the web. Otherwise it's off, most of the time.
> If student debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are “solved”.

Chesterton's fence definitely applies here.

If you don't understand what that law attempted to prevent in the first place, you're just going to get your pocket picked by a different group of people.
Thank you. How can something be different and the same?
There are ways to gauge the confidence of the LLM (token probabilities over the response, generating multiple outputs and checking consistency), but yeah that’s outside the LLM itself. You could feed the info back to the LLM as a status/message I suppose
RefDesk
Before LLM's and the contemporary advances, my good friend argued "AI" could never be funny, because humor requires subversion. Now I think AI humor is both here and art. I'm not an AI evangelist by any means, but the "Nothing, Forever" Seinfeld parodies (before they were de-likened) were the funniest video media at the time.
> the idea that higher education should cost anything

somebody has to pay it - whether it's the students themselves via loans, or via tax payers.

> Harvard, for example

so may be harvard, if they should so feel charitable, could pay for their student's costs via their endowment funds. But what about _every other uni_?

Not to mention that the endownment's a private source of funds - you're just as well be asking why don't billionairs just fund more public costs?
> By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated

Having a mathematical proof is nice, but honestly this whole misunderstanding could have been avoided if we'd just picked a different name for the concept of "producing false information in the course of generating probabilistic text".

"Hallucination" makes it sound like something is going awry in the normal functioning of the model, which subtly suggests that if we could just identify what went awry we could get rid of the problem and restore normal cognitive function to the LLM. The trouble is that the normal functioning of the model is simply to produce plausible-sounding text.

A "hallucination" is not a malfunction of the model, it's a value judgement we assign to the resulting text. All it says is that the text produced is not fit for purpose. Seen through that lens it's obvious that mitigating hallucinations and creating "alignment" are actually identical problems, and we won't solve one without the other.
Agreed with the overall consensus that we should let this market be guided by true market forces, but I also think people often assume the wrong outcome of this.

Universities give students a ton of control over their education. Where do you live, what classes do you take, when can you unenroll, etc.

Want higher graduation rates without lowering the grading bar? Simple, do not permit part time enrollment, even for one term. Sounds harsh.

Want better job prospects on graduation? Simple, kill off 90% of majors (dance, sociology, etc.)

The reality is that people generally think of college was a guarantee of success (it isn't). Many people would do better going to trade schools.

Attending an elite university will always be expensive (in HCOL cities, high demand for students and professors, etc.)

We need to stop treating college like a basic right, or a place for people to chase their dreams. Dream chasing is great, but if someone else has to pay for it, incentives will never align.