skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Online notaries have been a thing for awhile now. Don’t worry, we can still have dystopias with Notaries.
This is an odd take. Your programming language works with objects, the data is in relational tables, you need software to map the relations to objects. Thus the Object Relational Mapper. There's no reason you can't write SQL and let an ORM handle the result set mapping.
RemObjects C# – compile for Cocoa, Java, or .NET
More dishonest magical thinking. I wish this guy would learn how systems work and stop flooding the field with mystical nonsense unless he really is trying to make people think LLMs are worthless, then I guess he should be honest about it instead of subversive.
The way I read it is that the amount of energy available for direct use translates directly to the quality of life. The more energy they have, the more they can do with it. Plus if it’s clean and readily available. Instead of being world’s factory for garbage, or figuring out how to invade Taiwan, figure out how to supply clean, “reasonably cheap” nuclear energy.
I've recently been summarizing entire directories into a single chunk of text for use with Gemini, the other day I overshot and ended up pasting 28 million characters into vscode. It handled it pretty well.
One of the best written summary of LLMs for the year 2024.

We all have silently started to realize Slops, hopefully we can recognize them more easily and prevent them.

Test Driven Development (Integration Tests or functional tests specifically) for Prompt Driven Development seems like the way to go.

Thank you, Simon.
A concept can be expressed countless ways using countless vocabulary. You don't have to use the word "fanboy" or even the word "fan" to communicate fanboy, and you did literally say "fan" for all that.

FUD is not what's being said about Open Office. There is no fear, or uncertainty, or doubt being employed. There is simply a direct claim being asserted that practically all of the developers and maintainers of OO one day created LibreOffice and they are all there now, and OO has had nothing remotely like the development of LO since then.

That assertion may or may not be accurate, or the facts may or may not have changed in the last few years, but it's nature is not FUD.
Couldn't keep myself from asking if it's AI generated.
I'm well aware of the history of US-Mexico relations, but no, it's not an equivalent. For one thing, there is not a multi-century history of attempts by US to fully occupy and annex Mexico (there were people advocating for this back during the Mexican-American War, but they were a minority even then, which is why it didn't happen). For another, Mexico is itself a colonizer state in all the territories which US took away from it. But, most importantly, last time there was an armed conflict between the two states was over century ago.
The fundamental thing people need to realize is that package and app are different abstractions. They are not one to one related and they are not orthogonal. Distros deliver some open source apps as packages. But thats not the same as delivering apps.
I use var, together with let and const, where appropriate. What’s the problem with var I don’t get it.
> China creates a superbug via GOF research

In 2024, this isn't fact, it's just baseless conspiracy.

All evidence has ended up pointing to bush meat contamination.
I don't understand. Pointers aren't numbers, and can only be compared when inside a common array. What is small number memory?

:-)
2024 Garmin Connect Data Report
Yeah, still a hater.

> Takes roughly 2 minutes, ok.

Sure, then after 2 or 3 days it pops up again.

Do you want to use OneDrive? > No

Oh, too bad, You should turn it on, I will remind you in a few days. > 3 days, 5 days
Oh, Sorry, never is NOT an option.

How can that be acceptable!

At least you know where your configuration might be! On Windows, You don't even know where your apps configurations are. Is it in some deep level underground of registry? Or in App Data, local or roaming, or somewhere else?

On Linux, I know user based configs are in `.config`, and system-wide configs are in `/etc`. Some older app may store their config in home, but that's all. How is that difficult?! And everything is just text files and most of the time very nicely commented.

And I probably never needed to touch anything in `/etc` for almost over a year, unless I am messing with something.

> Search is not even available for multiple Linux DEs.

What?! Gnome has excellent application search, Win + one or two key presses I can launch my app, and it's actually consistent. No ads inserted randomly to interrupt my muscle memory.

KDE also have it. In i3 I can use `rofi` to do the same.

> MSI and GPO exist. Most serious applications nowadays have auto-updaters. Others often need no updates.

Oh, lol. How can one excuse the mess of going to each application's website, download binaries and install, and then let each and every app phone home to check for update, and then go through the upgrade dialogs, keeping watch if the app has inserted any search box or toolbar opt-outs? That is just absurd! I can just run `yay -S --noconfirm` and put password, and my update kicks in. Most of the apps are not bothered if I am running their latest version or not.

> Works near perfectly for 2 billion users.

Because, again, it's only feeding on the legacy, and because people pay the Windows Tax, without knowing, or in my country, it was easily available with new purchases for free (Piracy).

IF, people had to install Windows by themselves, I can confidently say, most of the people would stay far, far away from it.

> Barely works for its 40 million users, riddled with bugs/regressions and missing features.

I have been using Linux for 20+ years. I am not riddled by any of those 'bugs' and 'regressions', funny thing is, sometimes there are minor hitches, but again, they are minor.

And if I face a problem, I can communicate with the respected community, and get a solution. For Windows, which is a black box, you never know if you'll get any solution for your inconveniences. Like, getting rid of OneDrive, permanently. Or File explorer getting stuck indefinitely for hours after hour, and there's no solution to it. The client suffered for almost years, and he had no way to reinstall.
Identifying and Manipulating LLM Personality Traits via Activation Engineering
Which bit was dishonest magical thinking?

In case you're interested, here's a summarized list (thanks, Claude) of the negative/critical things I said about LLMs and the companies that build them in this post: https://gist.github.com/simonw/73f47184879de4c39469fe38dbf35...
You may lose access to your Google account. I run my own mail server and honestly despite always hearing that people have problems when doing this I've had 0 trouble in years.
He had everything against him - media, law enforcement, justice system, big tech, social media. They even tried to kill him twice and he still won.

So it was a big in your face landslide. Cope.
The article claims that this is true, yeah:

> Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m...

The article also claims to have spoken on the record with the accused's mother, so I have no reason to doubt the article's claim about the fellow's age.
It is a rather contrasting opinion that the trade-offs to have AI aren’t worth the value they bring.

The growth in this technology isn’t outpacing car pollution and O&G extraction… yet, but the growth rate has been enough in recent years to put it on the radar of industries to watch out for.

I hope the compute efficiencies are rapid and more than commensurate with the rate of growth so that we can make progress on our climate targets.

However it seems unlikely to me.

It’s been a year of progress for the tech… but also a lot of setbacks for the rest of the world. I’m fairly certain we don’t need AGI to tell us how to cope with the climate crisis; we already have the answer for that.

Although if the industry does continue to grow and the efficiency gains aren’t enough… will society/investors be willing to scale back growth in order to meet climate targets (assuming that AI becomes a large enough segment of global emissions to warrant reductions)?

Interesting times for the field.
You also need permission from the copyright holder.
> Every waste of money is not a Ponzi scheme.

Using this as an opportunity to grind an axe (not your fault, cactusfrog!): I find it clearer when people write "not every X is a Y" than "every X is not a Y", which could be (and would be, literally) interpreted to mean the same thing as "no X is a Y".
You may want to suggest they watch this as well >> https://archive.org/details/hogans-heroes-s-01-e-01-the-info...
It's an engine port from the decompilation project RE3. A lot to changes to get it to run
Which part of the linked article do you dispute?
I understand the value of a large screen. I don't understand the value of it not being a dumb monitor. My cellphone can play Netflix on the screen just fine, thank you. And it is far more likely to have interesting non-Netflix entertainment options as well.

And yes, code on microcontrollers can have bugs. But bugs mostly occur with advanced features or having those features hook into more basic ones.
I think it has less to do with the architecture or medium and more to do with the type of media itself.

We are more likely to actively preserve art in usable forms than something like JIRA. We play Chess more than we use whatever contemporary accounting tool. We read old novels more than we read transcripts of business meetings.

So we'll be more motivated to keep these architectures and games continually preserved.
opposite in the sense that everyone in austria and germany knows "dinner for one" and practically noone knows sound of music. while "dinner for one" is relatively unknown in other countries, despite being in english, but most know about "sound of music".
i myself heard people talk about "sound of music" when i was travelling in europe and i only first watched it while in latvia. knowledge about "dinner for one" is only spreading in recent decades as it gets shared on social media and international discussion forums, as exemplified in this very thread.
Simon gets one thing working for one task and assumes everyone can do the same for everything. That's the trick is that he has no idea how the failures happen or how to maintain actual working systems.
There's a lot of good cryptography and game theory and economic incentive alignment that can be done to constrain and limit the trust assumptions people have to make. But ultimately, all this does is redistribute and dilute those trust assumptions. It doesn't eliminate them. There is no such thing as "trustlessness".
@simonw you’ve been awesome all year; loved this recap and look forward to more next year
Auto modes have their places, as does retaining specificity of features. I don't think they're exclusive to each other.

And I don't think simple choices create shallow artists (or that the goal of Darktable is to create artists). Someone who doesn't have any arts education already doesn't have the technical understanding or vocabulary to really know what they're doing, so maintain the extra barrier? How many professional grade tools can you think of that have simple or guided modes?

The great part about software is that done well, it's often designed to be functional without a depth of specialty or expert knowledge, at least no more than a homeowner telling the builder "make my driveway to here" needs to know how to source and formulate concrete so that the end product looks good and doesn't crack or weather.
Same here,
If you wrote some functions, it's not DSL, it's functions.

If you calling them in a fancy way with overloads and whatnot, it's not DSL, it's fancy functions.

DSL is domain specific language. It includes domain specific syntax, domain specific semantics and domain specific libraries.
The Influence of Self
https://whistlebloweraid.org/
https://atinyhomeforgood.org/
https://archive.org
https://ap.org
https://muckrock.org
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/
https://americalabs.org/
https://www.marketplace.org/
You're Not Seeing Things, PS1 Games Are Playable on GameCube and Wii
What kind of phone are you running and how old is it? Apps don’t get any of that other information either unless you specifically approve it. If you want to give Uber just notifications and just location, you can do that.
> Or what if I live in a rural area and have very few local branch banks available?

Then you have to be ready to accept that there are advantages and disadvantages to your choice of where you live, and that is one of the latter.

There's a reason rural property is so cheap. It comes with a lot of disadvantages and inconveniences and costs that city-dwellers don't need to pay.
"The optimism buoying these war industries..." What a line.

I turned down a job working with good people for good pay in this industry. It will happen without me but I couldn't put my best ideas directly into creating weapons of war anymore (there are many stories in that last word). I know war happens and good people will be part of that so I don't think less of people that spend their lives dedicated to war but I wish we had this much enthusiasm and money behind efforts that didn't destroy things.
My guy/gal, state capitalism as a transition towards socialism and then to communism was an explicit Marxist policy by the Soviet Union. Hence that state (of state capitalism) was a part of the big-C Communism of the Soviet Union.

Sometimes thought-terminating quips are not enough.
Very cool, the generation of Chicago's L tracks seemed to be a challenge for the algorithm.
The World Before 8 a.m
And we're back to the beginning. One of the major costs of current reactors is regulatory burden. One of the reasons we don't see improvements in costs is it is extremely hard to release changes or new designs.
Re your last point: I am not sure if it’s a urban story, but I’ve heard there is an entire team at YouTube working on the play button.
Get some help, seriously.
I'm not sure if you're pointing out any / all of these:

#1. It is possible to get an arbitrarily fast tokens/second number, given you can pick model size.

#2. Llama 1B is roughly GPT-4.

#3. Given Llama 1B runs at 100 tokens/sec, and given performance at a given model size has continued to improve over the past 2 years, we can assume there will eventually be a GPT-4 quality model at 1B.

On my end:

#1. Agreed.

#2. Vehemently disagree.

#3. TL;DR: I don't expect that, at least, the trend line isn't steep enough for me to expect that in the next decade.
Maybe the person just really loves it when their dog dies early. :(
One of the things I find most frustrating about LLMs is how resistant they are to teaching other people how to use them!

I'd love to figure this out. I've written more about them than most people at this point, and my goal has always been to help people learn what they can and cannot do - but distilling that down to a concise set of lessons continues to defeat me.

The only way to really get to grips with them is to use them, a lot. You need to try things that fail, and other things that work, and build up an intuition about their strengths and weaknesses.

The problem with intuition is it's really hard to download that into someone else's head.

I share a ton of chat conversations to show how I use them - https://simonwillison.net/tags/tools/ and https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/ have a bunch of links to my exported Claude transcripts.
It seems better to put fake honeypot urls in robots.txt, and block any up that accesses those.
I've never had or wanted to update the software on my car.
No other person. nor GP said that Rockstar doesn’t have a right to their IP.
Accounting in a spreadsheet is scary?
No. Websites are more laggy, cookie disclaimers, weird dimensions, needless UX, choppy. Apps are almost always way smoother.
It would cost an untenable amount of money to rebuild all buildings, but that hasn't stopped us from creating and updating building codes.
If you were talking about a much more recently released game for a current gen console, sure.

Instead, we're talking about a 23 year-old game with numerous predecessors (including one on the way), on a 26 year-old console that hasn't been manufactured in 23 years. The number of people who will go to the effort of playing this pales tremendously in comparison to the rest of Rockstar's active market. There's next to no loss for them here.

And also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562089
I read "just sync the data" as naively doing reads over here and writes over there, and hoping that the two sources of truth don't diverge.

Queues and event processing are a necessity to do it right.
Likely 18 and 19 when most of this happened, but him barely not being legally considered a minor doesn't make the ethics of this much better.
It's AI generated according to on-line AI check tools

At this point, HN has to check every submission for AI content I guess.
So the emails live on my computer? You don't provide an address?

Is this just a nice GUI replacement for using gpg with eg Gmail?
And even then, it only gets location access while it's running (if that's the access that's set). And doesn't get to run in the background either (if you say it's not allowed to).
I'm a big believer in Claude. I've accomplished some huge productivity gains by leveraging it. That said, I can see places where the models are strong and weak. If you're doing react, or python. These models are incredible. C#, C++ they're not terrible. Rust though, it's not great. If your experience is exclusively trying to use it to write Rust, it doesn't matter if you're using o1, Claude or anything else. It's just not great at it yet.
Literally watching it right now. The best part of the German sketch is that before the sketch there's a presenter explaining why it's funny.
Not sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food.

Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
I'm not sure Russells take on Israel bombing Egypt proved that good -

>The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment...

In practice Israel's attacks on Egypt led on to their one Arab peace treaty nine years later. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Israel_peace_tre...)
We're seeing a split in models between deep and wide.

Wide models sound like they know more than deep models but fail at reasoning with more than a few steps and are cheap to train and serve. Deep models know a lot less but can reason much better.

An example I saw all moe models fail at a few months back was A and not B being implicit in the grounding text, all of them would turn it into A and B a substantial proportion of the time. Monolithic models on the other hand had no trouble with giving the right answer.

The Chinese AI companies can only do wide Ai because of restrictions on hardware exports. In the short term this will make more people think llms are stochastic parrots because they can't get simple thinks right.
Claude Sonnet 3.5 can write whole React applications with proper contextual clues and some minor iterations. Google has never coded for you.

I’ve written two large applications and about a dozen smaller ones using Claude as an assistant.

I’m a terrible front-end developer and almost none of that work was possible without Claude. The API and AWS deployment were sped up tremendously.

I’ve created unit tests and I’ve read through the resulting code and it’s very clean. One of my core pre-prompt requirements has always been to follow domain-driven design principles, something a novice would never understand.

I also start with design principles and a checklist that Claude is excellent at providing.

My only complaint is you only have a 3-4 hour window before you’re cutoff for a few hours.

And needing an enterprise agreement to have a walled garden for proprietary purposes.

I was not a fan in Q1. Q2 improved. Q3 was a massive leap forward.
Great summary of highlights. Don't agree with all, but I think it's a very sound attempt at a year in review summary

>LLM prices crashed

This one has me a little spooked. The white knight on this front (DS) has both announced increases and has had staff poached. There is still Gemini free tier which is ofc basically impossible to beat (solid & functionally unlimited/free) but it's google so reluctant to trust.

Seriously worried about seeing a regression on pricing in first half of 2025. Especially with the OAI $200 price anchoring.

>“Agents” still haven’t really happened yet

Think that's largely because it's a poorly defined concept and true "agent" implies some sort of pseudo-agi autonomy. This is a definition/expectation issue rather than technical in my mind

>LLMs somehow got even harder to use

I don't think that's 100%. An explosion of options is not equal to harder to use. And the guidance for noobs is still pretty much same as always (llama.cp or one of the common frontends like text-generation-webui). It's become harder to tell what is good, but not to get going.

----

One key theme I think is missing is just how hard it has become to tell what is "good" for the average user. There is so much benchmark shenanigans going on that it's just impossible to tell. I'm literally at the "I'm just going to build my own testing framework" stage. Not because I can do better technically (I can't)...but because I can gear it towards things I care about and I can be confident my DIY sample hasn't been gamed.
it is a pane to set up
If you're using an HDMI converter then that's most likely your reason for Hydro Thunder not working. Hydro Thunder notoriously doesn't work well with VGA output (HDMI converters for the Dreamcast usually convert the VGA signal)
How does AI democratize visual art? Anyone can pick up a pen and draw. Affording all the expensive hardware to train AI, on the other hand, is limited to a much smaller group of people, unless there's something I'm missing?
Ubsan is fantastic, but ASAN and the rest have serious caveats. They're not suitable for production use and they have a tendency to break in mysterious, intermittent ways. For example, Ubuntu 24.04 unknowingly broke Clang <=15ish when it increased mmap_rnd_bits. ASAN on Windows will actually check if you have ASLR enabled, disable it, and restart at entry. They interact in fun ways with LD_PRELOAD too.
I'm surprised at the description that it's "useless" as a programming / design partner. Even if it doesn't make "elegant" code (whatever that means), it's the difference between an app existing at all, or not.

I built and shipped a Swift app to the App Store, currently generating $10,200 in MRR, exclusively using LLMs.

I wouldn't describe myself as a programmer, and didn't plan to ever build an app, mostly because in the attempts I made, I'd get stuck and couldn't google my way out.

LLMs are the great un-stickers. For that reason per se, they are incredibly useful.
Conda init slows shell startup immensely
I hadn't heard of T2Tile. The intro video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreRFxN6wuM is from 5 years ago so it predates even GPT-3.

Do you know if any of the ideas from that project have crossed over into LLM world yet?
This is one of many reasons why I don't host on the open internet. All my stuff is running on my local network, accessible via VPN if needed.
It activates only 37B per query, but you don’t know which ones ahead of time, so you gotta store all 671B in (V)RAM.
Peek*
Here's a DSL example https://copilot-language.github.io/