skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is what you are saying, but to clarify, they will not own the power infrastructure. Execs from Google and Microsoft have already said this[0]

Microsoft have already entered into an agreement with Constellation Energy which pays to restart one of the reactors at three mile island. This comes with a 20yr purchase of the power from that plant.

There aren't many usable and idle nuclear power plants sitting around. It's extremely likely, as you point out, that states will soon be competing for jobs by offering land for both data centers as well as new power plants.

The best estimates I've seen but new construction of nuclear plants at 5-7 years. If this could safely be sped up then I assume big tech is already working to make it happen.

Of note, there are already some third parties/regulators working to stop big tech from capturing large shares of existing power generation[1]

[0] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-data-center-nuclear-power
I'm building an app to help organize information in Genealogical research (family trees/family history) - a few months ago I started doing some family research and I was struck by how many of the resources are owned by one company (Ancestry). I want to have an option that isn't within that ecosystem, and none of the other solutions I found had exactly what I wanted in terms.

The plan is to open source it once I feel good about it.

I don't have anything to show off yet but maybe by the time this thread comes around next month I will :)
It seems very difficult to build a moat around a product when the product is supposed to be a generally capable tool and the input is English text. The more truly generally intelligent these models get the more interchangeable they become. It's too easy to swap one out for another.
That's a very interesting phenomenon!
(From "Burn After Reading", a wonderful movie)
Are you familiar with Terraform Industries works?
Well, I'd say they committed petty vandalism. Somebody has to wipe that soup off the window and clean it off the floor.
I was thinking about that just the other day, who it would be really cool if Go had compile time code execution. I think Jai is making that a very prominent feature of the language.
I am working on Sciter.GLX - Sciter Engine (HTML/CSS/JS) combined with OpenGL runtime working on all platforms, even on those that do not support OpenGL natively (e.g. Windows/ARM and MacOS).

Sciter offers access to OpenGL as by WebGL/JS as by native OpenGL API access.

Idea is simple: pretty much any 3D application needs some form of 2D UI/Chrome.
And so Sciter.GLX provides just that - HTML/CSS/JS UI with <webgl> islands.

Sciter.GLX is also about direct support of as Wayland as X11 on Linux.

Check preview: https://sciter.com/sciter-glx-generation-4/
Knowing how and being politically prevented from doing so are entirely different things.

It’s nuclear or fossil fuels until an order of magnitude change in chemical storage.

No one is going to be building enough gas peaker plants sitting idle 360 days a year to achieve the reliability of the grid most consumers and modern civilization require. So it’s burn more gas or coal on a regular basis or enjoy power outages if you want what we have today.

I love solar. I plan to have a week or so worth of battery at an off grid home someday soon. It’s both entirely financially impractical (yay disposable tech income) and I will still back it with an expensive propane generator since I live over here in reality.
I'd go stronger still: the good things about any state has little to do with the governance.

Innovators, makers, risk-takers, etc., are who makes the good things happen. The very little needed is rule of law, and that's about it. Beyond that, it starts distorting society quickly: measures meant to help someone inevitably cost several someones else, and become weapons to beat down competitors.
It could be presidential ambitions, though I suspect his recent policies have been merely a way of not giving conservatives more ammo leading up to the 2024 election. The way he's been behaving recently is in stark contrast to pretty much everything he's done during and before his governorship. I don't think it's because he's suddenly any wiser.
Thank you.

I always think about this whenever someone says CA doesn't know what it's doing or it's being run wrong:

California's GDP in 2023 was $3.8T, representing 14% of the total U.S. economy. If California were a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world and more productive than India and the United Kingdom.
The problem with Postgres is that you have to read the doc (boring), sometimes read database books beyond chapter 2 (lmao nerds).

This filters out 99% of software "engineers".

So it's better to use KookaburaDB, version 0.2 just got released. It's written in Rust, and it's modern of course (whatever that fucking means: config written in YAML I guess? Complicated build and deployment?)
If the club holds the license the club owns the machines. Clubs are not for profits and need to return 100% of profits to the club & facility.

In practice this takes the form of Club Board members giving themselves generous contracts to renovate/clean/manage aspects of the club (via services companies that they or a family member own).

There are sports leagues clubs in NSW that rival small Las Vegas casinos in facilities and amenity.
Fossil fuel plants already exist for the base load. If they run only 5% of time, it will be lot cleaner than what we have right now.
The aesthetic of Cybertrucks, energy drinks, and MMA
LOL.

California's GDP in 2023 was $3.8T, representing 14% of the total U.S. economy.

If California were a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world and more productive than India and the United Kingdom.
It may be getting lucky, or it may be that they have really great leadership.

Very few other large tech companies have deep technical competence at CEO level leadership
ChatGPT benefits from network effects, where user feedback on the quality of its answers helps improve the model over time. This reduces its reliance on external services like ScaleAI, lowering development costs.

Larger user base = increased feedback = improved quality of answers = moat
> Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI.

logic programming is not directly linked to SQL, and has its own AI term now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI.
California is being terribly misgoverned, as you would expect in any single-party state. In some sense California has become like a petro-state afflicted by the resource curse: the tech industry throws off so much cash that the state runs reasonably well, not because of the government but in spite of it. We can afford to waste government resources on frivolous nonsense.

And this isn't a partisan dig at Democrats. If a Republicans controlled everything then the situation would be just as bad but in different ways.
Amazed it’s that low.

As a group, wealthy people (in the global sense — i.e. anyone reading this) aren’t inconvenienced enough by climate change yet. So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy that negatively impacts their quality of life in any way.

But they also don’t want to feel like Part of the Problem, so they’ll enthusiastically support do-nothing policy.
Not having kids makes early retirement and an adventurous life much more practical. With enough money I suppose you could try both at the same time?
Amongst a couple of guitar builds, I'm reverse engineering a bronze woodworking plane from the 80s/90s, a good friends dad used to make them. It's taken me over a decade to track one down, so I'm hoping to produce a set of models and drawings before passing on the original to my friend to hand down to their pending child.
On an amusing note, I've read something similar: Everything that works stops being called philosophy. Science and math being the two familiar examples.
Leaders Facing Justice 1945-2021 – Council on Foreign Relations
Data mobility in education allows educators to access a comprehensive view of learners’ skills, enabling personalised learning experiences. It’s not just about moving data, but making it accessible and actionable to benefit both learners and educators.

This blog post explores the importance of data mobility, its impact on skills visibility, and the future it holds for education.
> but the truth is their financial situation could be much better if they chose a different hobby.

Is this the new "Millennials would be able to buy a house if they would stop buying a $3.50 coffee"?
We've kind of done it in reverse with AI though - 'chatbots' have been universally shit for ages, and now we have good ones, but they're 'AI'.
Be born to rich parents, win the lottery, dumpster dive, live on the boat/aircraft?
> I get the sense that the value prop of LLMs should first be cut into two categories: coding assistant, and everything else.

Replace coding assistant with artists and you have the vibe of AI 2 years ago.

The issue is that these models are easy to make (if expensive) so the open source community (of which many, maybe most, are programmers themselves) will likely eat up any performance moat given enough time.

This story already played out with AI art. Nothing beats SD and comfyUI if you really need high quality and control.
This is very 1990s chain-email glurge story.
The magazine name appears to be "80 Micro", not "Micro"

It's also interesting to imagine an alternate universe where other early microcomputer companies (Radio Shack, Commodore, etc.) survived as long as Apple has.
I was contemplating tossing in a “If the policies you followed have brought you to this, of what use were the policies?” but it’s more than likely that these policies were designed to fail and were a distraction. Climate change to TPTB is a situational comedy.
It is ironic that this article seems to focus on the business logic, considering that is the same myopia at these AI companies.

Not that physical/financial constraints are unimportant, but they often can be mitigated in other ways.

Some background: I was previously at one of these companies that got hoovered up in the past couple years by the bigs. My job was sort of squishy, but it could be summarized as 'brand manager' insofar as it was my job to aide in shaping the actual tone, behaviors, and personality of our particular product.

I tell you this because in full disclosure, I see the world through the product/marketing lens as opposed to the engineer lens.

They did not get it.

And by they I mean founds whose names you've heard of, people with absolute LOADS of experience in building a shipping technology products. There were no technical or budgetary constraints at this early stage, we were moving fast and trying shit. But they simply could not understand why we needed to differentiate and how that'd make us more competitive.

I imagine many technology companies go through this, and I don't blame technical founders who are paranoid about this stuff; it sounds like 'management bullshit' and a lot of it is, but at some point all organizations who break even or take on investors are going to be answerable to the market, and that means leaving no stone unturned in acquiring users and new revenue streams.

All of that to say, I do think a lot of these AI companies have yet to realize that there's a lot to be done user experience-wise. The interface alone - a text prompt(!?) is crazy out-of-touch to me. The fact that average users have no idea how to set up a good prompt and how hard everyone is making it for them to learn about that.

All of these decisions are pretty clearly made by someone who is technology-oriented, not user-oriented. There's no work I'm aware of being done on tone, or personality frameworks, or linguistics, or characterization.

Is the LLM high on numeracy? Is it doing code switching/matching, and should it? How is it qualifying its answers by way of accuracy in a way that aids the user learning how to prompt for improved accuracy? What about humor or style?

It just completely flew over everyone's heads. This may have been my fault. But I do think that the constraints you see to growth and durability of these companies will come down to how they're able to build a moat using strategies that don't require $$$$ and that cannot be easily replicated by competition.

Nobody is sitting in the seats at Macworld stomping their feet for Sam Altman. A big part of that is giving customers more than specs or fiddly features.

These companies need to start building a brand fast.
>>> raise crops for biomass (sequestering CO2) and freeze them in huge aboveground piles during winter by running pipes through the middle

Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?
> But a rigorous proof that problem X can't be reduced to architecture Y is generally very hard to construct, and most people making these claims don't have one.

Requirement for proof is backwards. It's the ones that claim that thing reasons that needs proof. They've provided evidence (albeit shakey), but evidence isn't proof. So your reasoning is a bit off base (albeit understandable and logical) since evidence contrary to the claim isn't proof either. But the burden of proof isn't on the one countering the claim, it's on the one making the claim.

I need to make this extra clear because framing can make the direction of burden confusing. So using an obvious example: if I claim there's ghosts in my house (something millions of people believe and similarly claim) we generally do not dismiss someone who is skeptical of these claims and offers an alternative explanation (even when it isn't perfectly precise). Because the burden of proof is on the person making the stronger claim. Sure, there are people that will dismiss that too, but they want to believe in ghosts. So the question is if we want to believe in ghosts in the (shell) machine. It's very easy to be fooled, so we must keep our guard up. And we also shouldn't feel embarrassed when we've been tricked. It happens to everyone. Anyone that claims they've never been fooled is only telling you that they are skillful at fooling themselves. I for one did buy into AGI being close when GPT 3 came out. Most researchers I knew did too! But as we learned more about what was actually going on under the hood I think many of us changed our minds (just as we changed our minds after seeing GPT). Being able to change your mind is a good thing.
Does anyone else feel like this is just some sort of population control measure?
Do this too often and you risk losing the trust of your students, however.
> It's not some evil cabal gifting each other money.

Oh, they absolutely sit on each others boards and rubber stamp such packages.

> It's a contractual issue.

Yes. They should stop adding multi-million dollar golden parachutes for failures to said contracts.
> If the proprietary models stop moving forward, the open source ones will quickly close the gap.

This is the Red Queen hypothesis in evolution. You have to keep running faster just to stay in place.

On it's face, this does seem like a sound argument that all the $$ following LLMs is irrational:

1. No matter how many billions you pour into your model, you're only ever, say, six months away from a competitor building a model that's just about as good. And so you already know you're going to need to spend an increased number of billions next year.

2. Like the gambler who tries to beat the house by doubling his bet each time, at some point there must be a number where that many billions is considered irrational by everybody.

3. Therefore it seems irrational to start putting in even the fewer billions of dollars now, knowing the above two points.
I guess, I want to know what the how accurate the models from 1998 on have been.

Iirc, “An Inconvenient Truth” was put in 2006. I remember it winning Best Documentary.
The top of the nasdaq is full of companies that build computers (from phones to data centers), not companies that only do algorithms.

A clever AI algorithm run on rented compute is not a moat.
That's more of the solution than the problem. Most of the light is absorbed rather than reflected, but causing more to be reflected isn't that hard, e.g. cover a large surface area of low value land or ocean with cheap reflective material.
A few tells:

No left arm: <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

Possibly nonsensical shirt text: <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

Bottle labels a little ... too ... vague? <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

Utensils on plate seem off: <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

"ARXTC" text (on building) seems nonsensical: <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

Most obviously: man to far left has unnatural left hand, text throughout image is nonsensical (box, bottles, signage, fridge), faces and hands of men in black t-shirts facing camera are both mangled, food on foreground plate looks odd, and what's with the table piled in white powder (cocaine? flour? laundry detergent?): <https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....>

Save for the last most of that's nit-picking, and on casual glance I'd miss most of these.
Yes there are? Antibiotics for one.
Almost every residential building ever built can be broken into by throwing a brick through a window. We could use reinforced glass, but most people don’t. We still convict people for throwing bricks through people’s windows.

Generally speaking pacemakers aren’t failing from random radio signals, but if they fail if you specifically attack them, it’s your fault.
Yeah, went through a whole journey getting this to work on a NixOS guest with a Proxmox host recently.

You reminded me to write up the process, and publish a flake for NixOS users who want the kernel.
Back in the day (and I'm talking about when memcached was still written in Perl here, so late 90s or so) "bursty-write workloads" were a really good fit for us - using SQL queries as keys and storing the responses as values. For every read you first do a (super fast) memcached query using the SQL you're about to run as the key. If it exists, you just send the value back without running the query, if it doesn't exist you run the query and store the response as the value before returning it.

It depends a lot on how big your dataset is, and the distribution of reads across your data. But if you have a "fat head long tail" type distribution it can work really well.

(Of course cache invalidation is always a hard problem, which we worked around by trying to ensure all our code that did database writes knew how to delete relevant memcached entries, force expiring the whole cache at our lowest traffic times, and having a big red panic button that would delete the entire cache if needed.)
Are their websites up? Yes.
Move to another host.

So much drama.
Same here, except that I gather all the bibliography entries into a Zotero collection organized by paper and only export that to the latex workspace rather than using JabRef. Works a treat and keeps the size of the .bib file small.
There's a huge problem trying to do cross-jurisdiction statistical comparisons even in the best case. Taking literacy as the current example, what does it mean to be literate, and how do you ensure that the definition in the US is the same as the definition in the UK is the same as the definition in Germany? And that's before you get to confounding factors like migration and related non-English proficiency.

It's fun to poke at the US, I get it, but the numbers people love to quote online to win some kind of rhetorical battle frequently have little relationship to reality on the ground. I've done a lot of travel around the US and western Europe, and I see a lot of ups and downs everywhere. I don't see a lot of obvious wins, either, mostly just choices and trade-offs. The things I see in Europe that are obviously better almost 100% of the time are a byproduct of more efficient funding due to higher density. All kinds of things are doable in the UK, for example, which couldn't really happen in (for example) Oregon, even though they have roughly the same land area. Having 15x as many taxpayers helps.
gomponents look better; at least the `h.` prefix could be omitted. Also, it serves a simpler purpose than htmgo.

What do you think about https://templ.guide/? To me, the ability to still write raw HTML in Go is incomparable.
Hasn't this always been Amazon's strategy? It's never been like Facebook or Google in its ethos.
https://duplicati.com/
Maybe I’m making assumptions a rather than making an inference, but this seems like the perspective of somebody who wants to stop development of future technology altogether because of bad actors.

I’m not saying there aren’t concerns, but risks can be mitigated and precautions put into place to prevent catastrophes. Stopping development because of valid concerns is not the right move. It’s not even the right move to stop developing weaponry which has a stated goal of causing direct harm to other humans.

There are people in the world who will attempt to do these things and much more dangerous things recklessly and with far worse intentions than making money, and if those people get technological and military superiority over The West, the world will look very different than it does today. There are a whole lot more ways the world could be worse than it could be better.

The current world order is not ideal, but think about what the actual long term outcome is if The West stops.
That large protrusion on the right makes it easy to hold the camera. It's a convenient place to put a battery and a bunch of controls, too.
Yes the fire was required to set off the ammonium nitrate. But that’s just to initiate the explosion, and there are many ways it could have been initiated. A single spark would have done the job.

But you do not need to mix fuel with the fertilizer to activate it. It provides its own fuel.
Australia to Block Internationally Purchased 4G/5G Phones as Part of 3G Shutdown
Not really surprised.

Every time I open Apple Weather and look at the daily average it seems to be ~ +5c the norm, about a year ago I just put it down to "must be a warm summer" but it's been like that for almost 12 months now. It's autumn and it's crazy warm.

Either Apply weather has some serious bug, or it's the climate that's ruined. Even the trees seem a bit confused.

What's that data going to look like in a decade? I really hate to think.
What a weird statement. Ideally 0% of policies would fail, since the goal of having a policy is to succeed. If you're opposed to any climate policy, you should wish for NaN% failed policies instead (i.e. no policies at all).

Aiming for 100% failed policies sound like a way to make everyone, including you, unhappy.