skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well gary marcus a non lay person is helping spread word that ai winter is again upon us.

but maybe statistical learning from pretraining is near its limit. not enough data or not enough juice to squeeze more performance out of averages.

though with all the narrow ais it does seem plausible you might be able to cram all what these narrow ais can do in on big goliath model. wonder if reinforcement learning and reasoning can manage to keep the exponential curve of ai going if there are still hiccups in the short term.

the difficulty in just shoehorning llms as they are in any and every day task without a hitch might be behind the temporary hype-dying down trend.
I've done this, it only makes sense to me if you're trying to recycle some legacy code that's already using the domain types. Or else there's a bunch of extra conversion logic and unnecessary copying, feels like an antipattern
Oh the register allocator bugs they must encounter...
This reminds me of when Motorola introduced the first carrier-enforced, signature lock on Android with no "OEM Unlock" option and a bunch of ... questionably informed... people insisted it was by passable. (To my knowledge, it has not been bypassed, and jesus that was 15 years ago probably)

Granted, it's Nvidia, and they've been featured in devices that were notoriously hackable, but also, it's not 2018 anymore.

Needless to say, people should understand when they buy an Nvidia card, they should fully expect to use Nvidia firmware, with whatever that entails.

EDIT: I'd really like to remember the name of this device. It was the same era as Blackberry releasing... the Storm? Some resistitive-touch device with a physically clickable screen. Motorola Storm? I really wish I could recall. (sub-edit: I think the Storm was the Blackberry device. So something else...)
It's interesting watching the cycle of startup -> optimization for customer value -> brand buyout -> optimization for profit.

F.ex. Blimpie (MTY 2016), Jimmy Johns (Roark 2016), Firehouse Sub (RBI 2021), Subway (Roark 2023), Jersey Mike's (Blackstone 2024)
Working code some subset of the time, for popular languages. It’s not good at Rust nor at other smaller languages. Tried to ask it for some help with Janet and it was hopelessly wrong, even with prompting to try to get it to correct its mistakes.

Even if it did work, working code is barely half the battle.
Maybe I’m being pedantic but bodybuilders don’t generally “lift insane weights” or do bursts of maximal effort. That sounds more like powerlifting. Bodybuilders prioritize gaining muscle size, which is not equivalent to gaining muscular strength.
Can you share some of the zigbee devices that you are using? Thanks.
No, because you made a strawman argument.

It seems you're also unclear as to what "evidence-based" actually means.
Because HA is a single point of failure. It's big, complex, and frequently updated (there were 3 minor version updates this month already.) Any one of those updates could bring some issues that require fixes/rollback, and even when it's smooth, it takes a minute or two on my 8th-gen, i5-based, NVMe-having home server, not some underpowered Pi or SBC.

Meanwhile, a standalone MQTT broker like Mosquitto is rock solid, had 2 minor updates this year, and could run on the most minimal of hardware/LXC.
> It seems to me most scientists in the field are terrified of microplastics

Got anything you can point to? I haven't looked for a while but last time I did the evidence of harm appeared quite minimal. I recall that it was quite toxic in aquatic environments that had already been contaminated with (previously mostly harmless) low levels of heavy metals.

PTFE is similar in that it too hangs around in the environment for ages which is certainly a cause for concern. Yet it seems to be difficult to track down any known concrete negative effects. (If you are aware of any I would be interested in learning about them.)
I have a bunch of Kasa devices. I got them before Tasmota was really on the scene, because they are configurable and controllable without Internet access. The protocol could be better, but it does work. I've heard that TP-Link may have changed the protocol since then (at least on some devices), so YMMV.

https://github.com/softScheck/tplink-smartplug/blob/master/t...

https://python-kasa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli.html

As an aside - Tasmota is great, but I'd be very wary of random Chineseum off Amazon for switching mains power.
To become a freelancer you first need to be a professional with a lot of work experience. Then you can start doing some freelance on the side and make it grow. It's very difficult to start your career as freelance.

To find part time job you first need to be able to find a job at all.

Basically no matter what, it all begins with getting work experience, probably full time, then after that you can start looking for part time or freelance.
"In other words, you have built exactly zero commercial-grade applications that us the working programmers work on building every day."

The majority of programmers getting paid a good salary are implementing other people's ideas. You're getting paid to be some PMs chatGPT
This is why the natalism of certain oligarchs rings so hollow. If they were really serious, they would do everything they could to make it easier for their employees to have children, but they don't.

Meanwhile, I know several people limiting their family size due to economic constraints.
Argentina's economy exits recession in milestone for Javier Milei
We put test inputs and outputs in testdata/test_name.in.textpb and testdata/test_name.out.textpb, respectively. Way nicer than defining both your inputs and your desired outputs in go code, even compared to not using protobuf at all, to the point where we occasionally write some proto definitions just for test inputs and outputs.
Do you have a citation for Africans having adaptations against hookworms? That seemed like the stronger claim made to my reading.

I’m not aware that such a heritable adaptation to endemic pathogens was possible in this case, but then again, I was surprised to learn about the link between sickle cell disease and malaria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_resistance_to_ma...
I like to call it “Artificial AI”.
doesn't training require inference? so i guess it would help there too?
Beautiful article, thanks for sharing. Miss his writing.
> But that could be minimized. For example, by not taking precious square meters of Earth surface from the living.

I understand and even agree with the sentiment here, but to me “I don’t want to be buried” or “I don’t want a funeral” is micromanaging. I’ve expressed a preference for as little inconvenience to the people I love and as little damage to the Earth as possible. My children or whoever else survives me can make whatever decisions work for them. I don’t want my last act to be ordering them around. My dad, for example, had always planned to be buried, but when he was nearing death he suddenly said he wanted to be cremated, which was distressing to some of the family and was going to mean redoing a bunch of plans. When we asked him what was behind this sudden change of mind, it turned out he didn’t actually care one way or the other, he’d just recently found out cremation was less expensive and he was trying to save us money. Turns out it’s important to say what you really mean—“I love you and want to save you inconvenience and grief”—rather than “I don’t want a funeral” or “I don’t want to be buried” or whatever.

> That’s not inconvenience :)

Heh. You must not have been executor of anyone’s estate. It’s pretty inconvenient. All I can hope for is to have enough money that it’ll be worth it to whichever kid ends up doing it.
Moving people around in automobiles underground is a fun Disney-esque ride, but not a serious transit system.
Well the average remaining life expectancy of all adult humans currently alive is probably only a little more than 10 years so it makes sense.
Loved that book as a child.
Not with that attitude.

A corporation "is a person" with all the rights that come along with that - free speech etc.
The flip side of this is that it behooves everyone to be one of these greedy shareholders.
Twitter search “Russia”
In a Remote First World, Being Local Is the Only Leverage a Developer Has
How much can it possibly drive up the costs? My guess is practically not at all.
Repubs put it in with Ukraine aid to force it through.

And a consensus doesn’t mean it isn’t against the principle of the country and the first amendment. Literally. Banning. Speech.
Because it makes computer slower and people pay for compute.

I think consumer systems do it. macos shows the "quit some app, you're out of ram" but the system itself works.

but if you are asking that OS knows this is containers process and this is control plane process and treat them differently, I think no one does that.

Imagine how frustrating would it be if your os does it wrongly and you end up paying 10x because the os nerfed your main process because it thought something more important was running
So the main concern with keeping it in dumb mode I would think is that they could still snoop in on your streams through the plain old HDMI port.

So they snoop. There's no value to be had in it if they can't report back to the mother ship. Without a line of communication, the "personalized" ads premise fails.
Docker does not support USB/serial device passthrough on macOS https://docs.docker.com/desktop/troubleshoot-and-support/faq...
This in basically the answer. It’s a tool. Just like all the other tools. It is both very powerful and very stupid and the more you use it the better your intuition will be about if a given task is good for it or bad.

It’s not gonna replace developers anytime soon. It’s going to make you more productive in some things and those that avoid it are shooting themselves in the foot but whatever.

What will happen is software will march forward eating the world like it has for so long. And this industry will continue to change like it always has. And you’ll have to learn new tools like you always did. Same as before same as it will always be.
> It seems like the velocity of a project is the reciprocal of the number of independent implementations of a spec because any one of the implementations can slow down all the implementations (like what happened with proto3 around required and optional).

Velocity and stability/maturity are in tension, sure. I think for a foundational protocol like protobuf you want the stability and reliability that come from multiple independent implementations more than you want it to be moving fast and breaking things.
> What content promotes eating disorders?

There are numerous sites and social media pages on all the major platforms that literally promote anorexia. That you’ve never heard of them should perhaps encourage you to take a more curious and less combative approach to this topic.
They also have planes with autopilot. Who still flies planes, people. For that matter, all automated trains still have many people involved.
No, not just memes that encourage people to riot on the streets. But you know that, and it's funny that you think that you'd think that meme encouraging that should be enough to land someone in jail anyways. I mean, it fits very well with the servile "king's subject" mentality that your average Brit has but still, always funny to come across.

(And no I'm not american, but the UK is on the opposite end of rationalizing every single restriction and siding with authorities every single time. It's extremely pitiful to see)
In my opinion people that harp on about how LLMs have been game changer for them are the people that put themselves as never actually having built anything sophisticated enough that a team of engineers can work and extend on for years.
I never said we are working on new ideas only -- that's impossible.

I even gave several examples of the traits that a commercial code must have and that LLMs fail to generate such code. Not sure why you ignored that.
Have been writing Rust servers with Cursor. Very enjoyable.
All you need to do is look at the NFL to know how silly this claim is. At every level of sport, athletes have gotten bigger, stronger, and faster over the generations. You can write some of it off as hyper-specialization at the professional level, but that says nothing about small school single-a level competitors continuing to set new records in their respective sports.
No, they're both possible choices for your basic client-server communication layer that you build everything else on. (I mean, technically gRPC rather than protobuf, but protobuf is the biggest part of gRPC).
The IBM PC version is one of the first games I remember playing as well.

Do do do do do da do do…
> The problem is that so many people who only take Econ 101 seem to believe their understanding is analogous to understanding the physics of reality by learning Newton's laws and equations of motion.

This is in my opinion a bad analogy: if you have really understood these physics topics, your understanding of physics is surprisingly deep (I claim better than 99 % of the population) - classical mechanics is (unknown to many) an insanely deep rabbit hole.
How many of these posts do we have to suffer through?

It's just like the self-driving car—great for very simple applications but when will human drivers become a thing of the past? Not any time soon. Not to mention the hype curve has already crested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42381637
There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future.

And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).
You’re completely missing the point. The point being made isn’t about “are we implementing someone else’s idea”. It’s about the complexity and trade-offs and tough calls we have to make in a production system.
Yep, as cynical and demeaning that must sound to them, I am arriving at the same conclusion.
I recently used code-gen'd protobuf deser objects as the value type for an in-memory db and was considering flattening them into a more memory-efficient representation and using bitfields. That was for java though, not sure if they are doing the same thing there

Glad to see this change, for that use case it would've been perfect
Nope. It might even be illegal to offer a cash alternative. There are lots of complex laws around what companies can do, must do, and can't do with respect to healthcare.
My go-to with any 'thing x could wipe out everything or is better than everything' is exactly this. If nature hasn't found it then I don't worry as much. That doesn't mean this shouldn't be considered and studied carefully, but this sounds like a bit more fear than it likely deserves.
Nearly everything is static on mine too. I keep track of all the various devices' MAC addresses and assign them one IP. I also make sure that, even should I reinstall an OS on a device and "forget" to assign it a static IP, my router always assigns that MAC address the static IP I picked for that MAC address. I then keep a little range of IP addresses for unknown devices that the router is allowed to use when a new device shows up. Once in a while I log into my router and look which new device(s) I forgot to assign a static IP too.

When you say you ditched all ARP, did you do anything special? For example do you configure, on all your machines, static ARP entries for each MAC address of all your devices?
"The use of FORTRAN, like the earlier symbolic programming, was very slow to be taken up by the professionals. And this is typical of almost all professional groups. Doctors clearly do not follow the advice they give to others, and they also have a high proportion of drug addicts. Lawyers often do not leave decent wills when they die. Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. The situation is nicely summarized by the old saying, “The shoe maker’s children go without shoes”. Consider how in the future, when you are a great expert, you will avoid this typical error!"

Richard W. Hamming, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering”

Today, lawyers delegate many paralegal tasks like document discovery to computers and doctors routinely use machine learning models to help diagnose patients.

So why aren’t we — ostensibly the people writing software — doing more with LLM in our day-to-day?

If you take seriously the idea that LLM will fundamentally change the nature of many occupations in the coming decade, what reason do you have to believe that you’ll be immune from that because you work in software? Looking at the code you’ve been paid to write over the past few years, how much of that can you honestly say is truly novel?

We’re really not as clever as we think we are.
It's a message board frequented by extremely tech-involved people. I'd expect the vast majority of people here to have some financial interest in LLMs - big-tech equity, direct employment, AI startup, AI influencer, or whatever.
Long horizon problems are a completely unsolved problem in AI.

See the GAIA benchmark. While this surely will be beat soon enough, the point is that we do exponentially longer horizon tasks than that benchmark every single day.

It's very possible we will move away from raw code implementation, but the core concepts of solving long horizon problems via multiple interconnected steps are exponentially far away. If AI can achieve that, then we are all out of a job, not just some of us.

Take 2 competing companies that have a duopoly on a market.

Company 1 uses AI and fires 80% their workforce.

Company 2 uses ai and keeps their workforce.

AI in its current form is a multiplier, we will see company two massively outcompete the first as each employee now performs 3-10 people's tasks. Therefore, Company two's output is exponentially increased per person. As a result, it significantly weakens the first company. Standard market forces haven't changed.

The reality, as I see it, is that interns will now be performing at Senior SWE, senior SWE engineers will now be performing at VP of engineering levels, and VP's of engineering will now be performing at nation state levels of output.

We will enter an age where goliath companies will be common place. Hundreds or even thousands of mega trillion dollar companies. Billion dollar startups will be expected almost at launch.

Again, unless we magically find a solution to long horizon problems (which we haven't even slightly found). That technology could be 1 year or 100 years away. We're waiting on our generation's Einstein to discover it.
as a lurker here and at lfgss, just wanted to say lfgss exposed me to so much that i'm thankful for (not only fg/ss but also in cycling culture + more)

so thanks for all that buro9! <3
Intel battery life: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 shows off Intel's progress
For the general public, not the HN audience.
That seems like a fun challenge for sure. I’m so far down the other road that can’t opt for that, as I’ve been studying other people’s clocks quite extensively. It’s definitely obvious that these days, using modern tools like CNC machines and laser cutters makes clock making much more easy. So you have to find ways to make it more difficult, such as your attempt to do it blind, or my attempt to do it with 19th century methods.
> For some of the components it seems like a significant sacrifice in quality to make it yourself. I appreciate people can make their own, but I also think the obsession some folks have with in house movements is misplaced.

At a certain level, watches aren't about quality. Only exclusivity.
I guess increasing atmospheric CO² by maximizing your fossil fuel usage is one way to equalize the interior and exterior CO² of your house...
"This has never, ever been an industry where you will retire doing the same kind of work as you did when you started."

Seriously? It actually is an industry where people started coding in C and have retired recently, still working in C.
Yes, software engineering is different in many areas but today a lot of it is CRUD and plumbing. While SW engineering will not die it will certainly transform a lot, quite possibly there will be fewer generalists than today and more specialized branches will pop out - or maybe being a generalist will require one to be familiar many new areas. Likely the code we write today will go the same way writing assembly code went and sure, it will not completely disappear but...
Ask HN: Could an LLM predict someone's speech 5 seconds ahead in realtime?
LLMs are in many ways text predictors. Could you have an LLM that runs in realtime, watching a speech on TV for example, and predicts what the person is going to say 5 seconds in advance based on what they are currently saying? My friend was thinking about this as a test for State of the Union but then we realized that the transcript is published ahead of time so it would not be that impressive. But maybe something like the inauguration speech? Especially if tuned on previous speeches from that person.
What do you prefer to use for LLM pair programming?
Are you suggesting I and all governments should take him at his word?

I bet Zuckerberg also wants to pay more taxes too?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51497961.amp
“ Facebook boss 'happy to pay more tax in Europe'” 2020

But I guess the tax avoidance lawyers that he keeps hiring keep on tricking him. Gotta feel bad for the guy, but take everything he says, like “there should be more regulation” seriously and ignore the blatantly self serving nature of his statements.

https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/08/facebook-cu...

Facebook reduces tax bill 2024
I imagine that we don’t exist outside the simulation. There is no “waking up”. We exist in a computer’s memory and that’s it.
Only dodgy dinosaur companies with shitty ancient crusty management see engineers as cost centers. Any actual modern tech company sees engineers as the engine that drives the entire business. This has been true for decades.
And if those people are going to be talking about how great someone I despised was, it's best for all of us if I stay home.
Dank memes.
Yes. And "Introduction to Physical Modeling with Modelica". I also built the Modelica Playground (which I deliberately didn't link to because a thundering herd of HN readers would have crashed it).
Yeah, very likely. It's the new gold rush, and they are commanding wages that make me drool (and also make me want to howl in pain and agony and envy but hey, let's not mention the obvious, shall we?).

I always forget the name of that law but... it's hard to make somebody understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Such a “vector image” would be very large, if you put a limit on the length of the generated SVG the LLM would be blocked from pursuing that strategy. Even without an explicit limit, the LLM’s context limit may block it: if the resulting SVG is larger than the LLM’s context, the LLM may forget what it is doing part way through generating the SVG, which is unlikely to produce a good result.
Explain to me how you think a sophisticated random text generator will take all jobs. Especially since it’s trained on existing corpus of data on the internet created by? Guess who, existing engineers. I’m genuinely curious on the backing of these “trust me bro” style statements.
Yeah if it was pointing this way we won't see it presumably.