skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Years ago my tax return was flagged as a possible fraud case -- I believe a direct consequence of a big data breach. I had to go into my "local" IRS office and present my passport to prove indeed it was me. Decidedly not nice.

True to form, with an appointment I waited 3 hours at the office and watched the guard staff turn away countless people. Finally saw a person, gave then my passport, and finished in a minute.
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist
No, it's just that pursuing what you love as a job is a rare privilege. That doesn't mean it isn't work. But it's different from a day job, and if you expect me to believe that pursuing art is not more fufilling than some bullshit white collar job, thats laughable. It's kind of a moot point, because these jobs are going to be displaced. There's no sense in fighting technological innovation; history shows you can't stop it. If you try, some other joker is going to come in and take advantage of the technology, putting you at a disadvantage. This is how capitalism drives innovation, and historically, it's one of the few good things about this particular economic system.

It's a double edged sword, having what you love be tied to a wage. Capitalism mediates the scope of what you are allowed to depict. Market forces have created a scenario where existing IP is a safer bet. Just get out of the game. It rarely produces anything worthwhile anyway. Most art is garbage in this system. Better to do independent things on the side.
Elizabeth Holmes would like a referral to lawyer who could make that case.
It does look like an exit. Employees were given the chance to cash in some of their shares at $86 billion valuation. Altman is getting shares.

New "investors" are Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia will get the money back as revenue and fuel the hype for other customers. Microsoft will probably pay in Azure credits.

If OpenAI does not make profit within two years, the "investment" will turn into a loan, which probably means bankruptcy. But at that stage all parties have already got what they wanted.
I know that presidential alarms can’t be blocked, but I have yet to find if local “real” alerts can be blocked? The entire state of Texas was awoken recently because of something that happened in a locality that didn’t really affect anyone outside of it.

https://x.com/averytomascowx/status/1842146095612198944

I don’t need to know a cop is hurt 8 hours from me and the chances the perp would come into my life are bordering on infinitely small. What it can do is lead to lots of deaths because people turn off all emergency alarms because now they don’t trust the government to be decisive in sending out an alert that should have been local. Texas government definitely has a lot of joke elements to it. Evidently you can’t turn off these “Blue Alerts” unless you turn off all alerts. There has been nothing from the government about why this is allowed, only just radio silence, and they wonder why people have an axe to grind.
It's what you get when you have design by comitee instead.
I actually started out with rinf and switched when they moved to that architecture. rinf makes sense if your data model lives in rust, which is not the case in my app.
I reckon you are already aware of this if you’re using it to generate an initramfs, but for those reading along, you can also use it as a docker image
For people that don't get the references, this graph is so helpful for understanding the world.

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

It just keeps happening over and over. I'd say we are at "Negative press begins".
Really? Why is that more off putting than stating an age or any other demographic information that’s relevant to the piece?
1. Search engine replacement. I'm using it for many queries I asked Google before. I still use Google, but less often.

2. To break procrastination loops. For example I often can't name a particular variable, because I can see few alternatives and I don't like all of them. Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT and often proceed with his opinion.

3. Navigating less known technologies. For example my Python knowledge is limited and I don't really use it often, so I don't want to spend time to better learn it. ChatGPT is just perfect for that kind of tasks, because I know what I want to get, I just miss some syntax nuances and I can quickly check the result. Another example is jq, it's very useful tool, but its syntax is arcane and I can't remember it even after years of occasional tinkering with it. ChatGPT builds jq programs like a super-human, I just show example JSON and what I want to get.

4. Not ChatGPT, but I think Copilot is based on GPT4, and I use Copilot very often as a smart autocomplete. I didn't really adopt it as a code writing tool, I'm very strict at code I produce, but it still helps a lot with repetitive fragments. Things I had to spend 10-20 minutes before, construction regexps or using editor macroses, I can now do with Copilot in 10-20 seconds. For languages like Golang where I must write `if err != nil` after every line, it also helps not to become crazy.

May be I didn't formulate my thoughts properly. It's not anything irreplaceable and I didn't become 10x programmer. But those tools are very nice and absolutely worth every penny I paid for it. It's like Intellij Idea. I can write Java in notepad.exe, but I'm happy to pay $100/year to Jetbrains and write Java in Idea.
I don't really follow Altman's behavior much, but just in general:

> If he sincerely thought AGI was on the horizon he wouldn't be eyeing the exit

If such a thing could exist and was right around the corner, why would you need a company for it? Couldn't the AGI manage itself better than you could? Job's done, time to get a different hobby.
That being said, 4o is functionally in the same league as Claude, which makes this a whole different story. One in which the moat is already gone.
This paper is important to read.

The tone of the introduction is a bit preachy and the findings as stated are underwhelming and beyond obvious [1].

But when reading this type of papers -- and academic literature in general -- don't consider the application and research questions that were chosen by an academic and/or young graduate student with minimal resources. Look at the actual innovation. In this case, the methods. Then ask what else you can do with the increment of innovation.

It is now possible to methodologically analyze rhetorical patterns in open source communications on a shoestring budget. Because producers are also consumers, you can begin to understand at a very granular level which sequences of words elicit the desired effect in subsets of a population, and how. Work like this used to be laborious, expensive, and required a huge amount of socio-cultural training/expertise/judgement. By comparison, all of the technical work described in the paper has a relatively low barrier to entry.

Also: the obvious next step is to treat this as an optimization problem instead of a categorization problem.

--

[1] "othering intensifies during crises" is framed as a finding in this paper, but that's like using nukes to fish for trout. It's a fact we already know and have known for thousands of years. Therefore, the fact that the method reached this conclusion is best understood as validating a proposed method for automating intelligence collection and analysis in the context of open source war propaganda.
Concluding "who's worse" wasn't the point of this paper, it was to implement some automated analysis based on old social science models.

But, I'm surprised you conclude what you do because the high level findings seem to indicate that Russia war bloggers are more prone to the more extreme forms of "otherization" per the 4 degrees laid out in the model -- e.g. figure 7 shows Russian war bloggers significantly (but not massively) overindex on the 3rd (Villainization) and 4th (Dehumanization) degrees, which are the worse of the two, compared to Ukrainian war bloggers, who only overindex on the 2nd degree (Survival or Security).

Additionally, Table 4 shows Telegram channels that are more prone to otherization are more central (more influential) in the Russian blogger network than they are in the Ukrainian blogger network, as summarized by the line: "The results, shown in Table 4, reveal statistically significant correlations for both degree centrality and eigenvector centrality and the use of othering language by both groups of war bloggers, with a stronger correlation among Russian war bloggers."
> LiveKit is too expensive

Most of it is open source, especially the clients, although they do feel quite ad hoc hacked together (a possible side effect of WebRTC evolution).

Would totally agree on OpenAI moving away. The description of the agent here sounds like a big hack just to get around the fact temporarily the model server expects audio over sockets instead.
MergeLlama-7B – A fine tune of CodeLlama for resolving merge conflicts
I don't know what you're talking about, but I just imported a QUIC library and used it with a self-signed certificate. No extra steps required, either on the server or the client side.

Yes, the protocol is weird, compared to TCP. It has many extra features and one restriction, which is mandatory TLS, which I wouldn't even consider skipping anyway. Still nothing to do with ads.
I believe the mid study data from the end of the meal service is what you are looking for as that was isocaloric.

"And I have searched on my own before. Never found much of anything reliable or actionable."

Basically a tautology.
Your mention of Stalin is I think stronger as an argument that there’s been a significant change. Those fakes took lots of time by skilled humans and were notoriously obvious - what made them effective was the crushing political power preventing them from receiving critical analysis in public.

Similarly, while Photoshop made it easier it happened at a time where technical advances made the problem harder because everyone’s standards for photos went up dramatically, and so producing a realistic fake was still a slow process for a skilled worker.

Now, it’s increasingly available to everyone and that means that we’re going to see a lot more scams and hoaxes as people without artistic talent or willingness to invest time can make realistic fakes even for minor things. That availability is transformative enough to merit the concern we’ve been seeing here.
By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service.

Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have thought that was much more plausible than fully autonomous vehicles. And the human operators are truly critical, even more so than a skeptic like me assumed: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... (sadly the interactive is necessary here and archives don't work, this is a gift link)

I still think fully autonomous vehicles on standard roads is 50+ years out. The argument was always that ~95% of driving is addressable by deep learning but the remaining ~5% involves difficult problem-solving that cannot be solved by data because the data does not exist. It will require human oversight or an AI architecture which is capable of deterministic reasoning (not transformers), say at least at the level of a lizard. Since we have no clue how to make an AI as smart as a lizard, that 5% problem remains utterly intractable.

[1] I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.
If you want to learn more about this, I strongly recommend reading the 1978 book "How to Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games": https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/how-to-design-and-b...
If such a thing was right around the corner, the person who controlled it would be the only person left who had any kind of control over their own future.

Why would you sell that?
How you feel about your time is exclusively your problem. If you were personally interested, motivated, or needed some resume padding, you’d probably be a community member and a volunteer in addition to a “rational economic actor” or whatever you fancy.
L
State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles
I would love to read a solid exposé of Worldcoin, but I don’t think I will get that from Buzzfeed or from The Atlantic. Both seemed to be agenda driven and hot headed. I’d like a more impartial breakdown ala AP-style news reporting.
Definitely. But even if the iPhone were to be delayed there's no way Zune would have made a significant dent in iPod's market.

It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been.

iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten by competitors, it was in the iTunes purchases that made it comfy to own specific songs and also locked users in.
Very applicable to today's AI market moving so quickly. NVIDIA's recent open models are effectively the same as TI building a Radio to sell transistors.
What Is an Expert?
https://youtu.be/BVY20VI259Y?feature=shared

They get repetitive quick
Med-School Accreditation Is Outdated
>Typically, because they make so many bets, a hedge fund needs to be only 53-54% accurate with their predictions to make money.

Wouldn't that imply that every bet the fund makes is roughly of the same $$ value? I would figure more senior traders or more successful ones would vary the size of their bets relative to certainty or uncertainty of an event outcome (could be quarterly earnings, a political/geopolitical event, etc)?
The Transmutation of Sam Altman – AI Short [video]
This video is not mine, full credits go to @AriKuschnir (Ari K.).

I found this video recently and just wanted to share this piece of art. I think it’s quite well made!

Video description:
“What happens if Sam’s dream of AGI becomes our collective nightmare. Ironically, thanks to AI we can envision it. A short made entirely with AI about the dangers of AI.

An AI experiment by Ari Kuschnir
Story/script by Ari Kuschnir and David Sauvage

Tools
Additional Script ideas + Prompts - ChatGPT
Images - Midjourney, Grok
Video - Kling AI, LumaLabs Dream Machine
Sound Design - ElevenLabs
Music - Suno
Editing - Adobe Premiere”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/medical-school-accreditation-is-...
That’s not what happened to Theranos and Elisabeth Holmes
The one prior with the :// I think is better, not sure why they are changing it, it wasn’t that old, I guess the new CEO that ousted the person that had cancer that was supposed to be CEO, thinks this is a good idea
Yeah, I agree, this is a cool demonstration of growing capabilities in quantitative social sciences, probably soon leading to analyses that have been imagined for a long time but not (easily) possible until recently.

It'll take time to understand and integrate, but I imagine it should make theory that used to depend on small numbers of examples (glued together with rhetoric and charisma) richer and more sophisticated. Exciting.
Models are biased, but it is a bias we control through the selection of training data. The act of inference reflects this bias but is free from arbitrary rule otherwise.

I think this is a big step forward compared to policing by moody humans[1]. LLMs are a knife, let's use them for good instead of demonizing them.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
Case study: Faster fine-tuning with dataset clustering and thinning
The title of the article refers to this video.
https://youtu.be/6PJxc2B0G0M
I believe the YouTube channel is owned by the original creators.
Show HN: EchoMe, send inactivity notification to email or webhook
Echome is an inactivity notification that can send notification to email or webhook in case you can't echo/reset the timer. You can add a message in your notification.

Currently it has only email and webhook channel, but I am planning to add whatsapp (using unofficial API).
It's quite similar to my Grandad's Spica ST600 (started production in 1964).

They both had a leather case, too.
That comparison would make sense if the company was open source, non-profit, promised to make all designs available for free, took Elon Musk's money and then broke all promises includidng the one in its name and started competing with Musk.
It feel silly to say that AI is curing cancer. Normally a phrase like that would sinal the apex of the hype cycle but I guess it actually has some meat in this situation. Using AI more like statistical inference to screen for medical conditions or predict treatment could be helpful. I remember Jeremy Howard from fast.ai did that with deep learning to detect things in medical images. Seems like a good thing for CERN to do as long as it works.
haha, so true. I had the same experience while in graduate school.
This is where it gets murky. The algorithm could also recover a group without labeling anything — "Latent Group 7539".

Even then, how do you know the algorithm is recommending something "because" of the unlabeled sexual orientation class per se, and not because of some closely associated latent class?
> A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason.

Why is it in your worldview a CEO “has to lie”?

Are you incapable of imagining one where a CEO is honest?

> The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free.

I’ll allow it if you stipulate that randomly and without reason when I ask for an alternator it prints me toy dinosaur.

> It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology

As if the unethical sociopath TFA is about is any kind of, let alone the, inventor of genai.

> Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it.

Again, conveniently omitting the technology’s ever present failure modes.
Tried it for other things too, but then they just seem the same (to me). Maybe I'll give it another try, if it has improved since last time (2-3 months maybe?). Thanks!
In my case, when I was a Slackware user before Slackbuilds was created, sometimes I wanted to try out programs for which there was no package. Usually they required a .so file that was not installed and a workaround was to put it manually from a package of another distribution compiled for the same architecture. When the .so file was there, but on another path, a symbolic link was sufficient. The ldd command was a good friend.

Of course that was not the best and cleanest solution, having things outside the package management system bothered, but it was enough to experiment programs and I kept track of the changes so I could have the prior state of things. Later on, the Slackbuilds project eased the work and I contributed by writing code to automate the creation of a few packages. I learned a lot from these issues.
> Right. It's not a very widespread use case, to be honest. You'd find that most would be N actors for M threads (where N <= M

What makes you think that? Having a large number of actors per thread is by far the most important use case. The Actor model is commonly used in communication systems where there are hundreds of thousands of actors per machine (often one for every single user). In this context, Actors are typically extremely lightweight and not CPU-bound. Instead, they mostly focus on network I/O and are often idle, waiting for messages to arrive or be sent.
Indigenous People defend traditional farming in northern Thailand
Regency TR-1 Transistor Radio Facts and Figures
I’ve got a local llama 3.2 3B running on my macOS. I can query it for recipes, autocomplete obvious code (this is the only thing GitHub Copilot was useful for). And answer simple questions when provided with a little bit of context.

All with much lower latency than an HTTP request to a random place, knowing that my data can’t be used to trading anything, and it’s free.

It’s absolutely insane this is the real world now.
He seems like any other tech “evangelical” to me.
> Now with a new job, I have noticed that I'm always reaching for my phone after facing any roadblocks

When I hit those blocks of working for 5+ hours of flow, it’s because the difficulty of the work is at the right level. It’s mentally engaging enough that I’m not bored, but the problems are solvable (or at least I can feel like I’m making progress toward a solution) without feeling stuck.

If it’s a new job, there are probably more things leaving you stuck than when you left your past job. If you can identify what those areas are and spend some time getting better at them, I’m thinking it would help.

For me, new tools and trip me up. When we get new tools at work I spend time playing around with them and learning them, so I can use them effectively and they don’t become that thing that gives me a reason to take breaks every 5 minutes.
Topological chiral crystals with helicoid-arc quantum states (2019)
> They have not studied PCANS directly in humans

Stopped reading there. As promising as it sounds, I'll be a lot more interested when this is a product that's proven to work.

(Joke) Wake me when the human studies are done
I agree in most of what you said. The main problem for me is that I dont see LLMs are as solid foundations to create a company as technology progress from the 80s.

Im 42 though and already feeling old to understand the future lol
> specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose

While the attention-based mechanisms of the current generation of LLMs still have a long way to go (and may not be the correct architecture) to achieve requisite levels of spatial reasoning (and of "practical" experience with how different shapes are used in reality) to actually, say, design a motor vehicle from first principles... that future is far more tangible than ever, with more access to synthetic data and optimized compute than ever before.

What's unclear is whether OpenAI will be able to recruit and retain the talent necessary to be the ones to get there; even if it is able to raise an order of magnitude more than competitors, that's no guarantee of success. My guess would be that some of the decisions that have led to the loss of much senior talent will slow their progress in the long run. Time will tell!
Parametric cat ears
In mice, and also using a printed replica of a nasal cavity. It will be a while before we even see human tests, and I'm sort of curious how humans will respond to feeling their noses filled with a gel...
> Sam Altman has explicitly said the next model will be an even bigger jump than between 3 and 4.

You say unironically on an article stating that Sam Altman cannot be taken at his word in a string of comments about him hyping up the next thing so he can exit strongly on the backs of the next greater fool. But seriously, I’m sure GPT-5 will be the greatest leap in history (OpenAI equity holder here).
> I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so.

Right.

It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable.

I'm sure I'm missing something.