skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that if the limitations of current LLMs persist, regardless of how much better they get, this is not a problem at all, or at least not a new one.

Let's say you are given the declaration but not the implementation of a function with the following prototype:

const char * AskTheLLM(const char *prompt);

Putting this function in charge of anything, unless a restricted interface is provided so that it can't do much damage, is simply terrible engineering and not at all how anything is done. This is irrespective of whether the function is "aligned", "intelligent" or any number of other adjectives that are frankly not really useful to describe the behavior of software.

The same function prototype and lack of guarantees about the output is shared by a lot of other functions that are similarly very useful but cannot be given unrestricted access to your system for precisely the same reason. You wouldn't allow users to issue random commands on a root shell of your VM, you wouldn't let them run arbitrary SQL, you wouldn't exec() random code you found lying around, you wouldn't pipe any old string into execvpe().

It's not a new problem, and for all those who haven't learned their lesson yet: may Bobby Tables'mom pwn you for a hundred years.
> Autocomplete can use a search engine? Write and run code? Create data visualizations? Hold a conversation? Analyze a document? Of course not.

Obviously it can, since it is actually doing those things.

I guess you think the word “autocomplete” is too small for how sophisticated the outputs are? Use whatever term you want, but an LLM is literally completing the input you give it, based on the statistical rules it generated during the training phase. RLHF is just a technique for changing those statistical rules. It can only use tools it is specifically engineered to use.

I’m not denying it is a technology that can do all sorts of useful things. I’m saying it is a technology that works only a certain way, the way we built it.
Some good news on climate change in 2024
So you acknowledge that the job should be done but the people doing it deserve to live in squalor even though they work a full time job. Just for corporate profit and your convenience.

Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.
Is it possible to retrieve information in a RAG system with matrix multiplication? The CTO and Cofounder of FalkorDB, Roi Lipman, explains how using GraphBLAS techniques, yes, you can store and query a knowledge graph with math!

Highlights:

What is a sparse matrix?

How does it compare to a VectorDB?

Are GNNs the future?

Are knowledge graphs the answer to the lack of explainability in AI?
I just searched for a Wifi Extender on Amazon. This [0] particular model has 3.6k reviews, and is the first option after "Amazon's Choice" Must be good, right? How about we scroll down to one of those reviews [1]. Oh, looks like it racked up a bunch of reviews for being a washing machine hose, and then changed product SKU.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42452217
Then you'll have to memorize a lot of long numbers.
Everyone deserves the opportunity to earn a livable income, but not all jobs can or should be paying a "living wage." Some jobs by their nature are part time and some people only want to work part time.
TV studio cameras can apparently reach nearly 10x this.

Pro equipment can reach prices that seem unbelievable to prosumers.

https://youtu.be/RkTaMyatsTo
Protecting against bad actors and/or assuming model outputs can/will always be filtered/policed isn't always going to be possible. Self-driving cars and autonomous robots are a case in point. How do you harden a pedestrian or cyclist against the possibility or being hit by a driverless car, or when real-time control is called for, how much filtering can you do (and how mush use would it be anyway when the filter is likely less capable than the system it meant to be policing).

The latest v12 of Tesla's self-driving is now apparently using neural-nets for driving the car (i.e. decision making) - had been hard-coded C++ up to v.11 - as well as for the vision system. Presumably the nets have been trained to make life or death decisions based on Tesla/human values we are not privy to (given choice of driving into large tree, or cyclist, or group of school kids, which do you do?), which is a problem in of itself, but who knows how the resulting system will behave in situations it was not trained on.
They work and they are indeed expensive. I have a feeling in the coming years the popularity of GLP-1 style drugs is going to really skew the income:lifespan ratios even further.
The same can be said for modern android…
You can run modern Linux without an MMU! But other popular embedded OSes I've heard about are FreeRTOS and Zephyr.
Since learning that pigeons can compete with radiologists in terms of accuracy for mammography screenings [1], I'm willing to believe almost anything. Turns out neural nets really are pretty good at pattern matching/function approximation!

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151
To flip the question - any modern card provider will 2fa through an app if the payment is suspicious, so why waste your time manually entering them?

It's the same reason I use a password manager, it's convenient and 2fa exists.
I had a SHARP Aquos Phone SH-12C with a 3D camera and lenticular display and some of the photos I took with that phone are some of my most treasured photos since the 3D aspect really brings you back to where you were.

But back then everyone just said "3D is a gimmick I hate it I just want an normal TV" and the fad died.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/SH-12C

The iPhone recently added support for actually shooting spatial photos in addition to videos so I need to try that out.
Yeah, but at Amazon people will be more concerned of a robot part squeaking for better care than a human yelling for it.
Does that matter? If it is a lossless format, you can always convert it to another one after capture.
Most criminals are dumb. Anything that makes their job easier can increase the crime rate/efficiency of their criminal activities. I'm pretty sure stalking with devices increased after the Airtag was released.
What a dark era the US is entering.
GE was the granddaddy of the financial engineering shenanigans that have hit the others in the list. If we’re looking for a simple villain, it’s “Chainsaw” Jack Welch.
Levers are brain computer interfaces.
Amazons RTO5 seems to be on the path of backfiring
FAA Bans Drone Flights Near 'Critical Infrastructure' in New Jersey
There was a time when writing your own editor was considered a rite of passage.

Kinda like how art students copy master works and noob programmers recreate classic games (pong, space invaders, tetris, pacman, ...).

I love it when people share their rewrites, recreations.
Discussed quite a lot yesterday (344 points, 22 hours ago, 306 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42453660
https://archive.ph/c2LQT
Gemini Flash 2.0 Thinking Experimental
Because writing documentation requires you to use your code. Devs like writing code. Not reading or using "someone elses". It also requires you to look at what you've made as a critic. And actually test it non-trivially.
A lot of ideas are putting two or more existing things that were never put together before, or using an existing thing in a different context. LLMs can definitely do that, even if it never saw those two things put together before or used in that context before.
This is more broadly held than you might think. Just look at the outcry about Harambe.

My sense of kinship is weak with arthropods. Vertebrates are clearly kin. Birds and mammals are so clearly fellow beings, that I simply can't imagine caring about people if the concept of people must be narrowed to exclude them.

It goes the other way too. I find it easier to love my fellow human animals when I remember they are neurotic hairless apes wearing hats. Our intelligence is so new (in an evolutionary sense), we are just barely smart enough to pull this all off.
From Trillions to Millions: Unicode and the Evolving '兆'
Only one day? They must be juniors, that's at least a month or two - few hundred story points, dozen alignment meetings, QA, stakeholder buy-in, A/B tests, security consult, PM/PO/SM/EM/TL sign off, heck just catching up with the UX team alone would add a day's worth of calls.
Great input on the low quality deleted scene, never made sense to me!
Banning "gig work" seems like a very reasonable and even popular proposal. The economies it enabled are all terrible and it usually does very little to benefit consumers or workers.

Especially the point about workers assuming the risk of the corporation is not acceptable.
In natural language processing, mildly context-sensitive languages (which sit between context-free and context-sensitive) have seen some study and use, because context-free languages fall short to model certain phenomena but context-sensitive are overkill (and not even polynomial to process).
I love tools like this. I have my own single HTML file project for a HTTP video player along those lines. https://github.com/pseudosavant/player.html

I'll definitely be looking at the source code to see if there are any ideas I want to incorporate into my own single file tools.
Search for lost brother reveals dark secret of Mexico's 'death flights'
Is there a pro to having a language-specific impl? Zola doesn't require you to write any rust, it's just a templating engine for static blogs. Works wonderfully
The Dictionary of American Regional English (I first heard about it in A Way With Words - https://waywordradio.org/johnny-on-the-spot/ )

https://www.daredictionary.com/search?q=yous&searchBtn=

While I don't have a subscription to it (I haven't justified $50/year for that to myself) you will see that "youse" comes up with an "explore more" for Great Lakes, North Midland, and Northeast and "youse-all" shows up as Middle Atlantic.
I think that usage is common outside of Texas. A friend from Memphis uses it.
> To/from what sort of devices could the GPU read or write at 1TB/sec, besides main memory?

The 1TB/sec is between the GPU and the GPU memory, which is the bottleneck.

You don’t need that much bandwidth for loading inputs and outputting results, just for random access during compute.
Related:

Companies issuing RTO mandates "lose their best talent": Study

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444998

and from earlier in the year:

Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852
Show HN: Job Market Similarity (vector similarity graphs)
I'm happy with a Cherry G84 compact wired keyboard (G84-4100). Maybe it helps...
I guess that's something you could add into the remote backup server. I'm considering writing my own (in Go/Rust) and I might see if I can add that.
I don't know that engaging with santa as a symbol really jeopordizes this ideology in any meaningful way.
Discussion 11 days ago (143 points, 42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42360074
unions and strikes are not illegal.

The merits of unions, not always but their goals are, multiple. a/ compensation and working conditions leverage in negotiations b/ structure that can directly address all sort of issues the employer don't care about and isn't obliged to deal with.

That it makes your service experience particularly painful is exactly the goal, bad (or better, no) customers experience hurts the employer, guaranteed.

Disclosure: raised in France.
Isn't that the whole point of a strike?

You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.

Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.
Proxmox Announces Proxmox Datacenter Manager
>I'm guessing you've ruled out a marketplace / ACA plan for good reason?

Yes -- why are you using health insurance as an excuse for staying?
Fortuitous - I've been looking for a simple Kanban board this week and all the popular ones are a bit heavy (`plane` uses 8 containers!) or insist on using `mysql`.
Dupe (53 points, 1 day ago, 48 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451848
Good products can be hurt by experts' tough ratings, theoretical model reveals
So … what did you mean? Going by the plain English words, I pasted the title minus the “ask HN” prefix into Google and got a part-wrong answer. Asking here seems to be inline with practicing information literacy since it’s a community where people are more likely to have actual knowledge than some SEO bot, and there’s both attribution and community voting to help when assessing answers.
What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it.

We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.
Does that salary need to be above average at the time of hire, or throughout their entire tenure.

If its the prior then if an H-1B employee stays at a company for more than a few years it actually would come out to being cheaper overall, on top of them being more incentivized to just go with the flow and deal with any BS since their stay in the country depends on it. They have significantly less leverage than a US citizen to stay through grueling work conditions or toxic work environments.
Happy 400th birthday to the world’s oldest bond
Linked in another comment... The Dictionary of Regional American English https://www.daredictionary.com/search?q=yous&searchBtn=
Uh sure. Then why are they striking? I honestly don't know.
> I mean -- if nobody's surprised, then nobody has learned anything, and then what was the point of doing all this work?

I strongly disagree with this view on science. It's extremely valuable to scientifically validate prior assumptions.
No, but it certainly looks great on paper!
There's very little competence (and also money) required to buy a 3D printer, download a design and print it. A lot less competence than "being a machinist".

The point is that making dangerous things is becoming a lot easier over time.
Why? It's better if it's in one place and the overall quality is maintained there, than having different libraries with different authors, quality levels and guidelines.
I am not aware of any libertarian arguing this? Both of these statements seem like bizarre caricatures.

The libertarian argument for free market isn't that all information is available. And their argument against cartels forming definitely isn't that secret contracts are necessary to defeat them.
Are there not bigger constraints than battery life to a robot being able to do your shopping for you? It can't drive, public transit probably won't let a robot ride it, it can walk but it'll take forever. If it gets hit by a vehicle while walking, is the vehicle driver even committing a crime? Do you get reimbursed? Is the robot insurable? Do you owe the driver for damaging their car? If it gets to the store at all, will it be let in? If the store allows robots to enter, how is it supposed to pay? Robot's don't own bank accounts, so it has to prove it has the legal ability to use your account. Does this thing have Apple Pay and Google Pay integration built into it? You surely can't just give it cash or your physical credit card and hope that no one notices and steals it. Would a cashier even let a robot use a card that is supposed to be tied to a human identity? How do you authorize that? How does the robot prove it belongs to you?

For that matter, is there anything stopping a person from taking it and factory resetting? I tried to search for both "anti theft" and "theft" on that seller website and nothing came up. Maybe search is just broken for me? These are prominent features of mobile computing devices, cars, generally anything reasonably expensive you might intentionally or unintentionally leave in public unattended.

Apparently the site has an AI assistant, so I asked it. It said:

> Based on the provided context information from Unitree Technology, there is no specific mention of anti-theft features for the robots produced by Unitree Technology. The focus of the information is primarily on the various modes, functionalities, and control mechanisms of the robots, such as Zero Torque Mode, Damping Mode, Seating Mode, Ready Mode, Motion Mode, Standing Mode, Dance Mode, and Debug Mode. Additionally, the information covers services provided by the robots, including basic services, AI Sport Services, Normal Sport Services, Image Services, Network Services, and SLAM Services.

> Therefore, based on the available information, it can be concluded that there is no explicit reference to anti-theft features in the description of the robots produced by Unitree Technology. For detailed information on any anti-theft features or security measures, it is recommended to consult Unitree’s official resources or customer support for more specific details.

In typical AI fashion, that's an extremely verbose way of saying "no, there are no anti-theft features."
> I don't think there is really anything in your "etc. etc."

"etc. etc." = anything with state, so this can be quite a lot actually ...
"The model should ..."

Well, that's the actual issue, isn't it? If we can't get a model to refuse to give dangerous information, how are we going to get it to refuse to give dangerous information without a warning label?
At the place I went, they designed the curriculum around students that came in without it. But I guess testing out gives room for a gen-ed.

I dunno. The vibe in high school’s hardest math class and college’s easiest math class is kinda different. Might be worth doing both, haha. Easy A, too.
Genuine question: in your experience, does this increased focus on image create proportionate negativity in the form of e.g. increased peer comparison, superlatives (i.e. "I am/am not better/smarter/better looking than my peers") than your generation?
Midwest? I thought it was just a West Coast thing! (Also extremely ubiquitous in SoCal.)
This is quite nice. Not sure what the meaning is of a circle versus, say, a linear strip, but it’s very effective for showing the dominant colors over time. I’d love to generally see this for many movies across time; my understanding is most are color graded green/yellow now and it’d be nice to visually see this evolution.
Some of the mice have a toggleable on-board memory mode, where you can configure profiles that are saved on the mouse. You may be able to change the default lighting pattern back.
3 years and 11 months or 7 years and 11 months, conveniently with no middle ground in between.
>isn't it just doing what I trained it to when it tries to not be violent?

That's fair point.

Some models may have to trained from the scratch I guess.

Any sort of tuning of values after it is given values may not work.

Elon may have harder time realigning Grok.
Many of the Russian fighters still in active service have alcohol coolant. The ground crews are reputed to partake when they want a tipple.
Yeah, that whole statement there is probably unnecessary and I can see it being off-putting. I'll edit it if I still can.

However, I just want to make it clear that I wasn't intending to call anyone a "bad programmer". At least not in a personally insulting way. We've all been in a position where we were uninitiated at something. And most of us have been in a situation where we've jumped into a new programming language without having any kind of "formal" education on the design, philosophy, and intended best practices. For example, with Java, one should read documents like: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions..., especially this part: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions....

So, again, that part wasn't actually meant as an insult. We're all uneducated about many things at every point in our lives. And I think that lack of education or guidance on designing error types and handling has caused a lot of people to end up burying themselves in checked exception hell, and dismissing the whole thing because of that frustration.

The other part about cargo-culting... well, yeah, that was me insulting people.
Discussion (192 points, 21 hours ago, 61 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454586
We could be in perpetual bliss, but then we'd be passive. Members of the community that raise their 'discomfort' bar to whatever the current environment provides, become more proactive and thus increase their calories, social situation, ultimately their reproductive fitness.

We're in pain and fear because nature tuned us to ride this thin edge - unhappy but not too unhappy, in pain but not (usually) in debilitating pain. So we get off our butts and find a mate/home/food/safety in greater abundance (than our peers).
I run Planka in an LXC container on Proxmox, but this looks useful (despite being 'beta') for anyone who just wants an absolutely no frills local-first GUI for simple task management.

The README mentions that "Trello wasn't bad", but storing this type of data in the cloud wasn't desirable. Well, Planka is the answer to that.
> New technology enables hatcheries to quickly peer into millions of fertilized eggs and spot male embryos, then grind them up before they mature into chicks.

I think the title is quite misleading. They would still end killed, just earlier.
I'm using the router provided by ISP as part of the contract for service. As long as they don't withhold administrator credentials, no problem.
They did that before, it all depends on your definition of bare metal. They probably don't teach assembly, or circuit design even though that used to be bare metal
> When storing events for later post-processing, the packets' journeys can be reconstructed: [...]

> Retis offers many more features including retrieving conntrack information, advanced filtering, monitoring dropped packets and dropped packets from Netfilter, generating pcap files from the collected packets, allowing writing post-processing scripts in Python and more.

Would syntax highlighting be a useful general feature, or should that be a post-processing script in e.g. Python?
wtf. this does not sound like complexity, not even nonsense, actually.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong ]

I understand why this wouldn't be anyone's thing.

Do you know of any countries where government employees handled 'the whole thing' adequately?