skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got to have this kind of fun a few years ago, when a company in our building threw away a Sun Ultra 45, which I believe was the last of the SPARC boxes packaged into a desktop form factor. These things were the stuff of legend - we had the later x86 Sun's in college - and I quite nearly blew a fuse after my coworker sent a photo of it in a dumpster, without telling me where it was until 30 minutes later.

By this point, Sun hardware was mostly PC-like: it took SATA hard drives, DDR memory, and USB peripherals. You didn't need to issue STOP to get to the `ok` prompt, you just had to do some specifically-timed dance with the (soft) power button.

My guess, based on the company throwing it out, is that they hit the power button, got a blinking red light with no video output, assumed it was dead, and tossed it. At this point, I didn't even know yet that there was an `ok` prompt to get to, and I spent a few hours at the office that night, wrapping my head around the service manual before getting it to dump me to `ok` and let me poke around.

I dreamt for years of restoring it and using it as a NAS (ZFS!), but life got in the way, and I eventually sold it (sufficiently refurbed to be running Solaris 10, but missing things like the side panels and drive cage) for only $250 or so.
China's Radar Detects F-22 Stealth Fighters Using BeiDou Satellite Signals
This nagging language policing is so tiresome.
The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
There's also an old macOS preference pane called Network Link Conditioner that makes the connections more realistic: https://nshipster.com/network-link-conditioner/

IIRC, Chrome's network simulation just applies a delay after a connection is established
Well, it's not navigable, but there is
git log --graph --oneline --decorate
It is a bit unfair though as one is comparing new MCU to ancient parts. For example the TLV9301 is a updated version on the 741 and is superior in basically every possible spec, but people still use the 741 out of habit. And if you need a lower power discrete timer, the 555 is not the best way to do it in 2024. There are a huge number of options.

For art projects I totally get using a MCU. You're probably only making one and the product is the art. The engineering just gets in the way so minimizing man hours, which includes the time to learn to do the thing, is critical. It will be tough to beat a MCU on that metric.
This article seems to redefine the word "accountability". In the first sentence:

> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.

Why not just call it "no-consequence sinks"?

It's somewhat of an oxymoron to say "accountability" isn't working because there's no consequence. Without any consequence there is no accountability. So why call it accountability in the first place?

This article is describing something along the lines of "shared accountability" which, in project management, is a well known phenomenon: if multiple people are accountable for something, then no one is accountable.

If someone is accountable for something that they can't do fully themselves, they are still accountable for setting up systems (maybe even people to help) to scale their ability to remain accountable for the thing.
This article is filled with misinformation that any journalist should be ashamed of getting wrong. For example:

> where "64-bit" is immediately understood to mean x86-64 — because who wants a computer that can't natively run most applications made for a PC?

Huh? Sure, when people hear "64 bit", they don't think about Alpha, UltraSPARC or Power, but I don't think "64 bit" universally makes people think about x86-64, considering the ubiquity of 64 bit ARM CPUs in practically everyone's pockets. And "most applications made for a PC" has very little to do with whether something is 64 bits or not.

> the pure 64-bit architecture of Intel Itanium did not allow 32-bit (x86) applications to run natively

They were totally different instruction sets, so this had almost nothing to do with 32 versus 64 bit. The Itanic even had support meant to accelerate emulation of 32 bit x86, so if anything, Itanic would've performed dismally running 64 bit x86 code compared with 32 bit x86 or native Itanic code.

> Itanium landed with a thud in the market despite being among the first to the 64-bit punch

Itanic was late in the 64 bit world. Alpha, UltraSPARC, MIPS and even Power had 64 bit long before the 2001 introduction of the Itanic. AMD had already announced their spec and had development environments and toolchain support for x86-64 before Intel's Itanic release.

> However, the story of Intel Itanium doesn't quite end at the launch of AMD64/x86-64 in 2003 despite the obvious chilling effect. Itanium still kept support and was iterated on until February 2017, and shipments didn't completely halt until July 2021. For some fringe scenarios, Itanium was very performant and even ideal.

No. No, it wasn't. This tries to make Itanic seem like it was good enough to hold on until 2017, which is definitely not the case - Intel threw literally billions of dollars at the Itanic, but it really sucked. It never had any real edge over any of its contemporaries - not in raw performance, not in price per FLOPS or MIPS, not in aggregate performance. It was Intel proving that they're a one trick pony, which they still haven't figured out.

Aside from ethernet chips and x86, Intel has failed at everything - at embedded processors (Atoms have typically been woefully underpowered and have had reliability issues, like bricked Cisco routers), at broadband chips (see the Puma chipset debacle), at CPUs for embedded devices (even their modern "e" core devices like the N200 can't compete in performance per watt compared with ARM, and are too power hungry for anything you'd want to actually put in your pocket), at cellular chipsets, and so on.

Don't take my word for it. The Register does an excellent job of calling Intel out for their lackluster products and inability to compete outside of x86 (and problems competing inside of x86).
Likely having to do with the cert being for *.googleusercontent.com, and that is decidedly not *.googleusercontent.com
Is that the floating in space part and the robots and rockets surrounding it, or whatever the space suits look like? For now, space suits need to be safe and practical.
There is an argument to be made that gigabit ethernet is "good enough" for Joe Average.

Gigabit ethernet is ~100MB/s transfer speed over copper wire or ~30MB/s over wireless accounting for overhead and degradation. That is more than fast enough for most people.

10gbit is seemingly made from unicorn blood and 2.5gbit is seeing limited adoption because there simply isn't demand for them outside of enterprise who have lots of unicorn blood in their banks.
>> Also, are we all forgetting that within the past year SpaceX launches have had multiple unexpected catastrophic explosive failures?

> Well that's just a straight up lie.

I'm guessing they're confusing the expected, catastrophic explosive "failures" on experimental Starship prototypes with payload-carrying F9/FH flights.
With the drugs were you able to be more efficient for example code quicker, or was it more like better insights. Or perhaps both?
As an FPGA developer: much agreed. We know exactly what's happening every clock cycle (or at least can), and often are able to have extremely deterministic computation. You can do this on micros, but anything with good performance will have some caching, maybe context switching, etc. The polarfire SoC marketing has a graph showing either determinism or performance (I can dig it up if interested). In FPGA land, we define the pipelining such that we get both. I usually go out to an RFIC then stop caring, but you can calculate the latencies the as well.
Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems.

Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...
> If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

That's not how accountability works, in the traditional sense.

What you described is Person A (accountable for hiring) hiring person B (responsible for screening and evaluating candidates). Person A is still accountable for the results of Person B. If Person B hired a sh*t candidate, it still lands on Person A for not setting up an adequate hiring system.

Being accountable for something doesn't forbid you from delegating to other people. It is very common for 1 person to be accountable for multiple people's work.
The article mentions they made subtle changes that broke websites. One user had 150 broken client sites and had to fix one by one. If that happened to me I’d consider it a supply chain attack
You explained why 10G Ethernet cables are expensive, but why should it be so expensive to put a 10G-capable port on the computer compared to the other ports?
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them.

But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular.

I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.
Your credit card company gave it to them. See https://www.creditcards.com/education/recurring-charges-upda...
You may be right, but there is another hypothesis that would need to be rejected: at question is whether LLMs "do" language the same way we do. For certain they learn language much differently, with orders of magnitude more input data. It could be that they just string sentence fragments together, whereas (by hypothesis) we construct sentences hierarchically. The internal representation of semantics might also be different, more compositional in humans.

If I had time and free use of an LLM, I'd like to investigate how well it understands constructional synonymy, like "the red car" and "the car that is red" and "John saw a car on the street yesterday. It was red." I guess models that can draw pictures can be used to test this sort of thing--surely someone has looked into this?
I agree with your comment. Every UI framework I have used (AppKit, Swing, JavaFX, etc.) is not thread-safe. It requires all UI code in the main thread or, in the case of JavaFX, a dedicated UI thread (not necessarily the main thread, but it must be a single thread where all UI operations occur).
As per the article, the alternative was pencil not digital. For whatever reason the rule of the mental ward was there could only be access to pencils. Pencil marks are indeed more mutable and thus more vulnerable than pen.

Electronic signatures are an entirely different (and interesting) thing to consider.
Humans copy/paste from SO too. Does that prove humans can’t reason?
Nonhuman predators don't do math, or most of the other cognitive things which (I presume) the author of this article investigated in aphasics.
I've been smoking weed daily for the past 15 years and if much, my health is much, much better today than it was 15 years ago. Yeah, not a great study of 1 case, but tacit knowledge is the real deal.
A formal notation for reasoning could possibly solve some reasoning issues for LLMs. Perhaps something like Lojban or symbolic logic. We don't have a lot of data for it, but it might be possible to synthetically generate it.

On a dark note, I wonder if increasing AI reasoning capability could have dangerous results. Currently, LLMs are relatively empathetic, and seem to factor the complex human experience into it's responses. Would making LLMs more logical, cold, and calculating result in them stepping on things which humans care about?
nice and everything, but it still has plenty of performance issues and crashes with the tsserver. Using solid start because of that, tooling is not there yet.
This is kind of thought-provoking.

That is a good correlation when you think about how much more energy-efficient transistors are than vacuum tubes.

Vacuum tube computers were a thing for a while, but it was more out of desperation than systematic intellectual progress.

OTOH you could look at the present accomplishments like it was throwing more vacuum tubes at a problem that can not be adequately addressed that way.

What turned out to be a solid-state solution was a completely different approach from the ground up.

To the extent a more power-saving technique using the same hardware is only a matter of different software approaches, that would be something that realistically could have been accomplished before so much energy was expended.

Even though I've always thought application-specific circuits would be what really helps ML and AI a lot, and that would end up not being the exact same hardware at all.

If power is truly being wasted enough to start rearing its ugly head, somebody should be able to figure out how to fix it before it gets out-of-hand.

Ironically enough with my experience using vacuum tubes, I've felt that there were some serious losses in technology when the research momentum involved was so rapidly abandoned in favor of "solid-state everything" at any cost.

Maybe it is a good idea to abandon the energy-intensive approaches, as soon as anything completely different that's the least bit promising can barely be seen by a gifted visionary to have a glimmer of potential.
Reminds me of the mathematician who was asked how he mentally visualizes a 4 dimensional space.

"I simply imagine an n-dimensional space, and then set n to 4"
On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.
You must be into Apache Ignite.
how much did you think it was going to cost for space suits? where do you go for your discount space suits
Yeah, it definitely isn't good enough to be used unsupervised. TBH, they've switched to eye and head tracking as the primary mechanism of attention monitoring now. It seems to work pretty well, now that I've had a chance to try it.

I'm not quite sure what you meant by your second paragraph, but I'm sure I have my blind spots and biases. I do have direct experience with various versions of 12.x though (12.3 and now 12.5).
And it would be supplementary to the driver’s insurance, only covering incidents that happen while FSD is engaged. Arguably they would self insure and only purchase insurance for Tesla as a back stop to their liability, maybe through a reinsurance market.
> It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance on general cognitive tasks

If "general cognitive tasks" means "I give you a prompt in some form, and you give me an incredible response of some form " (forms may differ or be the same) then it is hard to disagree with you.

But if by "general cognitive task" you mean "all the cognitive things that human do", then it is really hard to see why you would have any confidence that LLMs have any hope of achieving superhuman performance at these things.
That's not death. That's non-virality.

For extroverts and fame-seekers, I guess that feels like death. But it's not.
When I was a grad student in STS I was considering doing a project on how software can function as an "agency adjuster" where individuals come to bear the risks of something (generally an economic transaction) and the majority of the profits go to the owner of the software. In many ways Uber & related services are about allowing individuals to take on very low-probability high-acuity downside risk for a small fee.
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
Adam Curtis’s All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and Rivbonfarms The Gervis Priciple were foundations of my professional career growth.
heh never works that way. an experienced bureucrat like you describe always has a shit-deflecting canopy. so whatever decisions he personally took are never attributable to him personally.

it just so happened.
I probably wouldn’t pay a monthly subscription (which may very well just mean I’m simply not part of your target audience, and that’s fine) — though if I could use something super simple like Apple Pay to buy a few scans for $1, I would probably do that.
Why do LLMs (or rather similar models that draw pictures) keep getting the number of fingers on the human hand wrong, or show two people's arms or legs merging? Or in computer-created videos, fail at object preservation? It seems to me they do not have a model of the world, only an imperfect model of pictures they've seen.
It has its advantages as you pointed out, but the issue is the torrent of garbage information it pours out. If it was possible to restrict your feed to only what you follows and have working filters, it would be great. But you don't.

And this amount of information on a singular person was only available if it was a roommate, coworker or a close friend. Which amounts to a small number of people. I don't think we were meant to deal with this.

While we also have a lot of information, interactions are starved. No real conversation is taking place. And it tends towards selfishness.
Dude its already a thing right now
Anything can be a server if it's set up to serve, so the distinction isn't useful here. Many people, educational organizations, companies, corporations, et cetera bought machines which have a desktop form factor which were used as servers.
It’s really a delightful piece of software. Came to the comments just to mention it, definitely recommended
"Highly intelligent" is not a word to be used with apes, dogs, rats or crows.
So if you want to look at your phone there's a voice going "I shall pick up my phone and swipe the lock away now."? Trying to understand if ALL thinking is in words or some subset.
>Does that prove humans can’t reason?

It could be said not as well as the ones that don't need SO.
Google made the web searchable not browsable.

Social and media networks inside their walled gardens took over browsability.
patio11 has an episode of his podcast Complex Systems where he interviews the author of this book. It’s well worth a listen / read, as is the book itself. https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
Hierarchical clustering applied to brain scans. As a clustering output, it's useful to conceptualize but not definitive of what one can expect from behavior nor development. If I am not mistaken, this is the original paper.[0]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01259-x
False, while you try to make this a moral point, the reality is where the audiences go the content goes.

Sorry that’s just life.

Source: worked on this research at Google for decades. We accelerated the issue unfortunately.
The points I get, but why replies? I thought the point of this site was conversation.
It’s a shame that Shotwell gets little to no recognition in the mainstream press.
One, two, ...many.
I think this idea is beautiful! I definitively would use it for some plants at home. But I'm not buying new plants each month, and even if I do, I don't know if I would use this for all of those. I have only 8 plants I would like to scan and forget, and the idea of subscribing throws me off, even if I can unsubscribe.

A better pricing schema for this, that also combat today's subscription fatigue, would be to sell X amount of plant scans. Like you can sell 10, 30 or 60 in different pricing scales. Pay once, the already scanned plants stay there in the users library. At least, I would find that pricing to be much more realistic and fair, and I suspect plenty of potential users are in the same boat as me. I will be able to personally scan the aforementioned 8 plants today, and 2 new plants in the long run, and it will feel great and fair.
It's actually very straightforward. The reply was by the General Counsel of Automattic and was intended to reduce Autmattic's liability. To that end, the first thing that was stated is that they had done nothing illegal.
This has been a long time coming. They made soft claims (as in unverified) some time ago that stealth wasn't very stealthy.

My personal fear is the perturbation to MAD if routine LEO surveillance can track deep water nuclear subs of any nation in real time.

Spy fiction implies thermoclines and haloclines in seawater provide some barriers but I suspect all spy fiction stories regarding what really happens.
You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do. At the end of the day it's a trolley problem (the real one, not deciding between two bad things, but looking at how people typically define reponsibility)

One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.

The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.

Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.
Im kind of the target audience since I am trying to identify certain species of native trees in my new area for a forest garden project and am not very good at it yet. That said I’ve tried these ML apps and it didn’t outperform me googling so I kind of gave up.

Especially with saplings they may not show the characteristics of the mature plant well but you can use context clues like if the parent tree is next to it.
On the contrary, I think open source strengthens everything. Where copyleft leaves users of other people's software looking over their shoulder to confirm they haven't broken the license, with open source licenses I can release some work and not worry about how it's used, and I can use somebody's work without fear that they will come after me later.

It does strengthen proprietary software. It also strengthens everyone else's software. It's the rising tide that floats all boats.
To be clear, my use of the word “photorealistic” instead of “accurate” was very intentional.
That's what TFA is saying, and they call it an accountability sink.
Yeah, but when you post the linkedin profile of the person doing the thing, people call you a scumbag. It's a hard social norm to move the dial on.
Thanks for the feedback! I think these terms are used a bit loosely, even though I try to be precise about it.

Your mental model sounds decent. I think there’s a few ways to describe things. I like to think of changes as a stable ID for something I want to accomplish, and a commit as the intermediate steps that make up a change. You can kind of think of a change as a branch… but I think that’s stretching it.
Oh for sure. We’re talking art here though