skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My understanding is that machine learning today is a lot like interpolation of examples in the dataset. The breakthrough of LLMs is due to the idea that interpolation in a 1024-dimensional space works much better than in a 2d space, if we naively interpolated English letters. All the modern transformers stuff is basically an advanced interpolation method that uses a large local neighborhood than just few nearest examples. It's like the Lanczos interpolation kernel, using a 1d analogy. Increasing the size of the kernel won't bring any gains, because the current kernel already nearly perfectly approximates an ideal interpolation (a full dataset DFT).

However interpolation isn't reasoning. If we want to understand the motion of planets, we would start with a dataset of (x, y, z, t) coordinates and try to derive the law of motion. Imagine if someone simply interpolated the dataset and presented the law of gravity as an array of million coefficients (aka weights)? Our minds have to work with a very small operating memory that can hardly fit 10 coefficients. This constraint forces us to develop intelligence that compacts the entire dataset into one small differential equation. Btw, English grammar is the differential equation of English in a lot of ways: it tells what the local rules are of valid trajectories of words that we call sentences.
Sometimes I find myself lying in my sunroom, staring out the window in the blue sky above me while the sun plays on the maple tree, empty of most all but a few red leaves … wondering what else I can do to make the already angry readers of my babbling even more angry.
Have your Bot call my Bot and they’ll have lunch.
Some things are important, everyone should know them. Cooking is important for everyone, sadly comforting the dying eventually is too...

But priorities are also important, and some skills can only be learned by doing. Which is often unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous, and time consuming.

Some stuff has a very low chance of directly being needed. I've never written a paper check. I could probably Google how to balance accounts if I had to.

Vets should have a little more tech skill, but software should be a lot easier.
Teenage Engineering: OP-XY Field Sequencer
I think people are thinking of "generation" wrong in this context. It need not mean people born in the 60s or 80s or 2000s, but just the people alive and involved in the social sphere during a time - like right now. I think we have seen a lot of this manipulation across media for the last decade or two but taken to extremes. Whether you are liberal or conservative or something else, many media outlets are spinning a tale that your rights are being violated and the others are bad people who wish to deny you of those rights. Even the same people yelling about their first amendment rights are simultaneously blocking and banning those who have opposing views on any topic. The Us vs Them mentality is being cultivated all around. Taken far enough that people legitimately feel like their existence is under threat, those telling the story can get you to do almost anything, like shoot up a mosque or trash the capital.

It's nothing new. The Nazis, the Cold War, the Satanic panic - we see examples throughout history of how this can lead people to do terrible things.

But I bet a lot of people aren't even aware this is happening to them. Sometimes you need someone to point out the elephant in the room.
> Even if an ML/AI/software engineer has a public GH with projects on it, there's no strong reason to expect it will be a useful signal about their expertise.

That's only true if you don't know how to read code. I simply read their code and based on my level of expertise, I can determine if someone is at least at my level or if they are incompetent.
I don't see that discussed, could you quote it?
Proprietary instead of thunderbolt? :(
Lots of things are popularity contests. It’s very difficult to escape when you’re in it, but they always fizzle out, leaving remarkably little behind. Your promotion at Enron has no meaning today, but at least the little string parsing library you wrote may still be in use and someone is happy about it, decades later.

The point is that your impact isn’t defined by a McKinsey trained head of HR who gamified a career ladder for you, or the opinion of “important people”. In fact, what impact means depends on where and (crucially) when you measure it.

Some professions have longer reward cycles than a human lifetime. Great writers, artists and thinkers are often recognized posthumously. Doesn’t mean everyone should write poems, but we shouldn’t exacerbate a culture where you’re useless if you can’t charm your closest mediocre middle manager. Life is more.
To be fair in the human-based teams I've worked with in startups I couldn't show you products with decent retention.
I honestly think that perhaps what stage of your career greatly influences these types of decisions. I have been in the industry since the ‘90’s, way before FAANG and “big tech” arrived to the scene. Once they did I never understood why everyone seemed to flock to these jobs. Of course it is money stupid I said to myself but there is lots of money to be made elsewhere.

If we are after money alone I honestly never understood yet again why big tech - in my career I figured that the absolute best way to have a prosperous career (and make a shitton of money along the way) is to get to the point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. I ballpark there are 10 such employees at each big tech while I ballpark there is at least 1 (or few) and most if not all not-big-tech. And there are A LOT of not-big-tech companies and you don’t have to spend months/years… to prepare for some BS interview or do some silly shit on leetcode or whatever. Find a company that has been in the business for a long time and has good books (my decision on whether to pursue a job at a given company are largely based on two things - would I invest money in the company and whether or not I think what they do is meaningful (I interned at Monsanto while in college and cannot ever forgive myself for that - since then what company does is more important than what my compensation is).

Once you land a job slowly start looking at things everyone else stays away from - that will always be the case. It’ll be something “some dude wrote - you shouldn’t touch it, no one knows how it works” … well except you, you badass will figure it out (better months spent than doing leetcode crap that is the biggest waste of time imaginable) and then after some time it is you, YOU are that gal/guy without whom nothing gets done, no fires get put out swiftly etc…

I would never work for FAANG or big tech - first and foremost for the reasons you are pondering as well as additional reasons where I just can’t see ANY reason except money for someone to work there and there is money elsewhere…
I think the answer by teika kazura on the linked page explains pretty thoroughly why this is not “good enough”. Most importantly:

> In Unicode the letter ℘ is given the codepoint U+2118 in the block "letterlike symbols", named "script capital p". But in fact it's lowercase.

Unicode technical note https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn27/ clarifies:

> Should have been called calligraphic small p or Weierstrass elliptic function symbol, which is what it is used for. It is not a capital "P" at all. A formal name alias correcting this to WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION has been defined.
1. The person I'm replying to is hypothesising about a future, not yet existent, version, GPT5. Current quality limits don't tell you jack about a hypothetical future, especially one that may not ever happen because money.

2. I'm not commenting on the quality, because they were writing about something that doesn't exist and therefore that's clearly just a given for the discussion. The only thing I was adding is that humans also need guidance, and quite a lot of it — even just a two-week sprint's worth of 15 minute daily stand-up meetings is 18,000 words, which is well beyond the point where I'd have given up prompting an LLM and done the thing myself.
Asking for feedback from the community but not directly indicating how this feedback can be submitted sounds to me insincere and probably just PR speech.
I sure hope there is some bright eyed bushy tailed graduate students crafting up some theorem to prove this. Because it is absolutely a feedback loop.

... that being said I'm sure there is plenty of additional "real data" that hasn't been fed to these models yet. For one thing, I think ChatGPT sucks so bad at terraform because almost all the "real code" to train on is locked behind private repositories. There isn't much publicly available real-world terraform projects to train on. Same with a lot of other similar languages and tools -- a lot of that knowledge is locked away as trade secrets and hidden in private document stores.

(that being said Sonnet 3.5 is much, much, much better at terraform than chatgpt. It's much better at coding in general but it's night and day for terraform)
No real reason. I just made it up. But that's kind of my reasonable expectation of longevity of a machine like a robotic lawnmower and battery life.
If you've got clearly defined start input format and end output format, sure it seems that it would be a good candidate for heavy LLM use. But I don't know if that's most people.
I did not say it was much harder. I called your response glib because you appear to be reading much more into my response than was actually written and speaking on many assumptions. If you want a summary of my first post which was to an outsider asking why brokers exist in the NY marketplace, it is that there was some marginal benefit which now is even less in my opinion.
Your hypothesis here is not exclusive of the hypothesis in this article.

Name your platform. Linux. C++. The Internet. The x86 processor architecture. We haven't exhausted the options for delivering value on top of those, but that doesn't mean the developers and sellers of those platforms don't try to improve them anyway and might struggle to extract value from application developers who use them.
>"CNN calls MAGA Fascist"

I certainly see a couple of videos with CNN reporting on someone calling GOP fascists, but... that's it. I don't see any CNN reporters or anchors explicitly, and repeatedly, calling them fascists. No montages, either. Oh well.

>... even despite that youtube rigs their search results against conservatives.

So, I'm supposed to go to YouTube to find "countless, easy to find" (your words!) proof that I'm looking for, but once I've started searching and finding little of any of that, your response is, "YouTube rigs their search results against conservatives". What was that you'd said about shifting goalposts? :)
Ok, I've changed the title to that of the paper now. Submitted title was "Vanessa Freudenberg's SqueakJS Paper Wins ACM Sigplan Most Notable Paper Award [pdf]".

I've also moved Don's original description to the top of the thread so people have the context about the award.
Global Illumination for Rio Terminal
ζ is essentially a cursive z. ξ is near enough to a backwards 3.
Test-time compute is also known as beam search but I guess it's good to see the neural network folks keeping the tradition of rediscovering old techniques and giving them different names.
Yeah I was going to call out MIT for pointing out the obvious, but there's enough noise/misunderstanding out there, that this kind of article can lead to the 'I get it' moment for someone.
I find this perspective both scary and exciting. I'm curious, how do you validate the LLM's output? If you have a way to do this, and it's working. Then that's amazing. If you don't, how are you gauging "work best"?
Remember that senior roles are about building teams around you to get the job done. I'm wondering if your current experience reflects what the job has to be, or whether you could shape your team so that your job gives you energy, and other people do jobs that give them energy, and together you get the job done.
Actually started laughing seeing that
"GenAI" slop is a time-vampire.

In a world where anyone can ask an LLM to gish-gallop a plausible facsimile of whatever argument they want in seconds, it is simply untenable to give any piece of writing you stumble upon online the benefit of the doubt; you will drown in counterfeit prose.

The faintest hint that the author of a piece is a "GenAI" enthusiast (which in this case is already clear from the title) is immediate grounds for dismissing it; "the cover" clearly communicates the quality one might expect in the book. Using slop for hero images tells me that the author doesn't respect my time.
It's not that simple though. The initial guilty verdict was not even the decision of a jury, but the result of a fairly abnormal procedural decision by the judge. There was then a follow-on hearing to determine the amount in damages, where Jones' lawyer "accidentally" sent loads of evidence, not required by discovery, directly to the prosecution. The entire suit against Jones is filled with interested parties and corruption. It is definitely not a good example of better arguments prevailing.
They also took the name of a programming language that predated Google’s go as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
If it were ever clearly defined or even consistent from input to input I would be overjoyed.
a lot of people use the For You feed by default, since Titter makes it very inconvenient to use Following:

- cannot disable/hide For you
- always default for you, and no way to default to Following
Ah yes, reusing an empty list NIL as the false value because having a separate #f atom is bad for whatever reason.
> "I see LLM as a power tool for domain experts, and you have to assume whatever it spits out may be wrong, and your process should allow for it."

this gets to the heart of it for me.
I think LLMs are an incredible tool, providing advanced augmentation on our already developed search capabilities. What advanced user doesnt want to have a colleague they can talk about their specific domain capacity with?

The problem comes from the hyperscaling ambitions of the players who were the first in this space. They quickly hyped up the technology beyond want it should have been.
Or.. just have telcos do that to each other, instead of offloading any more of their service onto their customers/victims?
I know your description includes "still get regular radio play", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is "The Most Unwanted Song". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
With an ESP32 or comparable (RPi Pico W, for example) you get MicroPython or CircuitPython support! That means a Python interpreter, drivers for popular peripherals and usually a network stack. Performance doesn’t beat a native SDK but Python is Python.
The Unicode charts for the mathematical symbol ranges can serve as a visual index: [0]

They open as PDFs and have grids of all the symbols, along with useful metadata such as related and similar symbols, common substitutes, alternate names, etc. You won't find everything in those ranges - some things are elsewhere in Unicode, in their native language or already located elsewhere in an earlier version - but it's a great resource. Even for symbols that are merely letters in some language's alphabet, Unicode sometimes provides a unique codepoint (character) for their use in mathematics.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/charts/

That provides each table as a separate PDF downlod: mathematics covers ~20 PDFs, each named for its contents. It may be faster to download the entire Unicode standard as one PDF (~140 MB):

https://www.unicode.org/Public/16.0.0/charts/
It seems to me that Gopher just failed to keep up with the times. Embedding images into the page was a killer feature for HTML and Gopher was still doggedly text based because they were still supporting the VT100 users that had been the core userbase. Plus the web went on to support text formatting, tables, and even eventually layout.

The article isn't entirely correct about the early web being completely free. Netscape was not free software, at least on paper. In practice they didn't try to stop people from spreading it far and wide and I think the sales were somewhat modest despite being the core element of a technological revolution. Also, I guess NCSA Mosiac was technically around, but it lacked enough features to make it a second class citizen compared to Netscape Navigator.
Definitely weird results, but I feel there are too many variables to learn much from it. A couple things:

1. The author mentioned that tokenization causes something minuscule like a a " " at the end of the input to shatter the model's capabilities. Is it possible other slightly different formatting changes in the input could raise capabilities?

2. Temperature was 0.7 for all models. What if it wasn't? Isn't there a chance one more more models would perform significantly better with higher or lower temperatures?

Maybe I just don't understand this stuff very well, but it feels like this post is only 10% of the work needed to get any meaning from this...
Besides feeling like every blockchain article is word salad, I tried pretty hard how they provide any integrity guarantees but couldn't find anything. The core problems with decentralized computing are privacy and integrity, i.e. I don't typically want someone knowing what I compute, and I don't want them to be able to muck with my results. AFAIK you need hardware support for this (a la SGX or TrustZone) but I couldn't find any reference to this stuff.
I tried to do pretty much this on a Kobo reader and discovered the Kobo browser doesn't support javascript. :|
Oh no I mean if we claim we have an AGI and it's true, it should be able to do that. LLMs are not that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Kurtz
Yeah — exactly. I’ve never seen anything that makes me doubt he’s a good person. But he seems utterly unable to distinguish between bullshit artists and genuine experts.
There are a lot of different t views on debugging with a debugger vs print statements and what works better. This often seems to be based on user preference and familiarity. One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is for issues with dependencies. Setting up a path dep in rust or fetching the code in whatever language you’re using for your project usually takes more time than simply adding some breakpoints in the library code.
But he did?

Or didn't he?
OpenStreetMap Available in Dark Mode
Interestingly, not only the UI is dark, but the map tiles themselves are dimmed too.
> I guess the elected representatives have indirect power over everything in the end, if France is still a democracy. May be lots of layers of indirection, like the need to pass or change a law, but still.

Yes, in the end of course. But these layers of indirection are extremely important. In my country right-wing politicians are currently rallying against prosecutors they think are "too lenient" with criminals. If it weren't for the indirection those prosecutors would have been replaced with the politicians' yes-friends long ago.
At least lead is still vegan.
I had forgotten just how much I hated that inescapable song in the 80s. Definitely close to my worst song ever. There's plenty of 80s pop that I've softened my views on as I got older and even started to grudgingly appreciate, but not "we built this city".

I don't think I'd even recognize a single Taylor Swift song. I plan to keep it that way, currently she's just a name and a face to me, knowing her music would probably only cause me to dislike her unfairly.
I don't baselessly speculate about it. But yes, I do think I can predict with some confidence that PyPI is not going to remove API token access.
Alternative in the EU: https://www.invisible-computers.com/
I'm Upskilling to AWS [pdf]
I too save information that may have future value in a textfile. I too am managing knowledge!
Well, yes, given Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors self-destruct if you look at them funny, it's not surprising. I am waiting for the Zen5 Threadripper to replace my Xeon.
Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe
pets.com was valued at $400 million based almost completely on its domain name. That's the classic example. People were throwing buckets of money at any .com that resolved to a site and almost all of it failed. I'm not sure how that doesn't meet the definition of over-hyped. It feels very similar to now. Not even to mention - the web largely doesn't consist of .com sites anymore, it's mostly a few centralized sites and apps.
Looks like they just route 17 PCI-E lanes out of the chassis by shoving a 16x and a 1x slot next to each other. Not the best, but hackable.
Austrian Economics and AI Scaling
no, it wasn't a civil case.

https://x.com/AlexJonesMW3/status/1856495252850229386

its so frustrating that the only reason i am able to post this is because of X... because searching for this guys name or "poject veritas nudge" does not produce the result that it obviously should anywhere except for X. this is the tactic that is so often used by people like you. state something that is factually correct but completely incorrect and misleading when the full context is taken into account. even if this were an actual civil case brought on in the normal way it would still be the undeniable truth that one billion is silly and that this is political.
1. I think the main thing is that Elon's own tweets are almost always make it to global broadcast via For You feed.

2. This effectively makes everyone see whatever Musk personally likes/retweets

3. It is soft of correct that there is more freedom of speech due to slashing/nonexistent moderation

4. But because algo promotes whatever Musk retweets, it makes Musk chief in charge of the algorithm. Whatever Musk likes - will be shown to everyone.

5. Because the rest of the feed is noise and garbage, this effectively makes Musk inject a strong signal to a feed and makes him a moderator. If censors previously would censor by deleting posts, he censors by throwing garbage and noisy posts and sprinkling signal in a few places
Yep. falcor84: you’re thinking of the so-called ‘multilayer perceptron’ which is basically an archaic name for a (densely connected?) neural network. I was referring to traditional perceptrons.
Normalizing remote work requires lowering standards for getting interviews and roles?
You might be interested in GM Matthew Sadler's work, he agrees with you. Here's a link:

https://www.newinchess.com/media/wysiwyg/product_pdf/9073.pd...

He's been arguing that "intuition", i.e., reading a position based on your understanding of the game and not on calculation, is a big deal.
> the suppression of women voters

That's the joke. It's 2024 and that's not a thing anymore in America.
Update: users automatically rejoin 'dynamic' campaigns as soon as they fulfill the criteria
Note: the possibility is not mentioned in the article but rather in the comments [1]. I had to click a bit to see it.

The fact that the one closed source model is the only one that plays well seems to me like a clear case of the interface doing some of the work. If you ask ChatGPT to count until 10000 (something that most LLMs can't do for known reasons) you get an answer that's clearly pre-programmed. I'm sure the same is happening here (and with many, many other tasks) - the author argues against it by saying "but why isn't it better?", which doesn't seem like the best argument: I can imagine that typical ChatGPT users enjoy the product more if they have a chance to win once in a while.

[1] https://dynomight.substack.com/p/chess/comment/77190852