skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.

Why do you think that is?

> The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44

Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?

> People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.

Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?

You said:

>I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?

And I'm telling you, directly and upfront, why it matters. You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor. You have chosen to try and shift away from the argument when I brought up why it matters. The persistent effects of past bad acts is why it matters where you were born and of what skin color.
> I wonder what caused the fire to burn more heavily before anyone took action?

High winds don't help:

> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.

> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.

[…]

> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.

> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.

* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
My main machine is a 3.8GHz 8-core Ryzen, 64Gb RAM, GTX1070 GPU. Bought and self-built in ~2018 and still seems pretty good for development and the odd game. Even the 1TB Toshiba SSD is claiming to be healthy according to the monitoring app. It just zips along and copes with everything, and I've never felt any temptation to upgrade anything.

Me back in 2005 would have though this setup was science fiction.
Shared IPTV Restream and Watch2Gether with Friends
The arm holding the monitor was the weak point on those machines. They all seemed to droop after a while. Fixing the problem was near impossible.
With the world's population now exceeding 8 billion, we need to be thoughtful about the best way to rewild ourselves. We can live in dense cities with concrete high-rises but animals can't. Many animals at the top of the food chain need significant ranges for themselves. So the challenge is finding a way that we can minimize our footprint while also providing more opportunities for legitimate connection with nature. Put another way, a bimodal life - with time split between a concrete high-rises and natural areas is probably more ideal for the overall system than a push for everyone to live in slightly more rural areas.
These software “engineers” that insist on the latest-specced toys are part of the problem. By not living up to their imagined title and actually engineering within constraints (constrained hardware performance which would beget more efficient software), they’re just punting and saying “oops, -I- didn’t do this”. But they’re not engineers and never will be until they take some responsibility for being a partial cause for the current mess.
As someone who’s not participating in the discussion, can you elaborate? “No it isn’t” is an unhelpful response without any explanation whatsoever.
> Poor water management […]

More water is helpful, but only up to a point:

> “I’ll be clear: We could have had much more water. With those wind gusts, we were not stopping that fire,” Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said.

> When winds are as strong as they were Tuesday and Wednesday — reaching 100 mph on mountaintops and surpassing 60 mph along the coast — firefighters are severely limited in their tactics, experts said. They make it too dangerous and all but impossible to establish any fire perimeter. They blow flames as tall as 200 feet horizontally and send balls of red-hot embers flying at speeds that can carry them a mile or two away, where they start what are known as spot fires.

[…]

> The lack of firefighting by air was a critical deficiency that persisted from Tuesday night through early Wednesday, fire officials said, and one that has allowed other devastating Southern California fires to spread in the past, including the Woolsey Fire, which burned across a footprint just to the west of the Palisades Fire in 2018.

> “Without helicopters, this kind of a brush fire, we cannot stop it on the ground,” said Margaret Stewart, an LAFD spokeswoman.

* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/20...
Would it be crazy for a decision-maker to think the commercial is pitching a turnkey solution to keep Matthew McCaughnehey out of the rain, as opposed to a platform where a Salesforce developer could potentially create such a system? Or do they have a better handle on the big picture than I did before reading your excellent post?
On-device query intent prediction with lightweight LLMs to support conversations
The author pretty much acknowledges that with the YouTuber example. And yeah, you can create a fairly long list of other reasons why people may want to upgrade.

But here's the thing: in the 1990s, people pretty much needed to upgrade regardless of what they were doing. Sure, you had a few holdouts. These were people who would continue to use Wordstar and had no interest in exchanging documents with people who use that newfangled Microsoft Word. These people were the exception rather than the rule, since most people wanted to be able to share their documents, get onto the internet, or any other number of things. Chances are, they also had multiple reasons to upgrade.

The situation is quite different today. You can get away without upgrading because most of the software, if not all of the software, you need will run just fine on an old PC. As for the other stuff, maybe you'll have one or two reasons to upgrade. Is that enough to justify it? The answer is going to depend upon the person, and the actual task they need to complete. For most people though, I would suggest that they don't feel the same compulsion to upgrade their computer.
> How long until

Minus a decade, if not more — I personally had (and then rejected) that specific idea as a world-building element in the novel I've still not finished writing.

(I'm not sure when Robert Miles did an eye tracking laser turret, or even if I dreamed it, but if he did it, it was also ages ago now).
I may be reading this completely wrong but this makes me think of a possible mechanism of aging..

At the beginning of our lives there are processes that are turned on that signal for us to grow from babies to adults. Very abruptly these processes stop when we are able to reproduce or just after. But the stopping of these processes is never complete because tissues still need to be repaired, things physically still need to adapt. So now you have some subset of the original growth processes turned off (thus not causing adults to keep growing) but also have some subset that don't turn off. This combination of growth processes that are on and off causes "growth" without the macro growth of the adult but this causes aging.

Idk just a shower thought
> One of the reasons could that you realize you don't need those parts, so it would have been a waste of time to write tests for them.

Or perhaps the parts existed, were useful, did have tests, and now a new feature requires refactoring that temporarily breaks things before I finally bring the house in order again. But I don't want to throw out the tests because parts of them may still be useful.

My point is, if the code is capable of being compiled and run, who is anyone to dictate that I shouldn't be allowed to run it (even broken) during my development cycle, just for some bureaucratic "I know better than you" reason?

This is the problem I see all over - people peer out from their limited perspective, assume that they see enough, and then make excessively restrictive policy decisions about what we can and cannot do. It's hubristic and so very, very annoying to the rest of us, especially since they also have a tendency to double-down, and there seems to be no way of getting through to them.
Modern technologies like AI and robotic weapons are similar to World War I's chemical gases and airplanes. Like in the 1930s "air superiority" became a phrase, "drone superiority" or "robot superiority" will be a phrase to describe modern warfare.

Hopefully politics, sociology, psychology, and economics will have evolved enough in the past 100 years so we don't face the losses that were experienced in the first half the 20th century.

That is awesome and terrifying.
I felt like that from 2010 or thereabouts to two years ago. There wasn't really a use case for having a very fast machine. Now with llms and sd, I think there is a use case that happily absorbs any compute I can buy, just like first person shooters in the 90ies.
on my teams, I've set expectations that people look at PRs between tasks. Don't stop flow for it, but don't jump straight to a new task or come back from a break without making sure nobody is blocked waiting on reviews. If the whole team follows that method, and keeps their PRs fairly small-ish, PRs typically fly through the system just fine, and it also spreads the PRs across the team.
MacMall accidentally sent my dad a box of Marathon games, probably meant for a store's shelves.

Marathon ended up being one of my favorite games from that era. The Windows kids had games like Doom and Quake, but we had Marathon.

Mac marketshare was so small at the time that there was an implicit craftsmanship that came from anyone targeting Mac - you expected higher quality, because they cared enough to use Macs in the first place. (Some of that mentality lives on to this day.) Of course id made great games too, some of which did eventually come to the Mac.

Marathon is a first person shooter, set in space. It has a compelling storyline, as well as fun art and weapons.

My dad's office had an AppleTalk network, which was kind of like Ethernet but strung together with regular phone cables. I used to bribe my little brother to commandeer the network with me and play Marathon.

There were ultimately 3 Marathon games, that were eventually open sourced and ported everywhere. You can find them online and on Steam as Aleph One.

Fun fact: the game that launched the Xbox was originally made for the Mac. Bungie, the creators of Marathon, showed off their new game Halo at the Macworld conference. The hype train went through the ceiling, and Microsoft bought it as a launch title for their new gaming project.

Since then, Sony bought the rest of Bungie and is preparing to launch a new game in the Marathon universe.
This reminds me of the CHiPs episode "Bright Flashes", where robbers temporarily blind patrons and staff so that they can rob stores. It's from 1982, when lasers were the hot new thing and imaginations ran wild. To my knowledge, it never became a thing, because why would it?

Similarly, why would you want to target an individual with an AI laser weapon to blind them? To kill them, sure, like the Israeli assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, but not to blind them.
Diffusion Models Generalize via Geometry-Adaptive Harmonic Representations
That's a lot of assumptions on how a company you don't know internally handles tickets and/or feedback.
There's also the no-macro solution where you just use ":%norm [series of keystrokes]" to run the given keystrokes on each line, but that comes with the added difficulty of not giving any visual feedback of what the keystrokes will do before you submit the entire line.

One thing to keep in mind is that ":%norm" will place the cursor at the start of each line, before any indentation, whereas the trick of ending the macro with "+" will place the cursor at the start of each line after the indentation. But this can be worked around with ":%norm ^@q", using ^ to skip indentation before running macro q on each line.
> Matt Mullenweg is in desperate need of an intervention. Seriously, the man should seek professional help.

The generosity inherent in this sentiment is fundamentally a mistake. Mullenweg will keep dominating his domain if people cannot even recognize that he's an adversary, not a friend in need.
more ways to the replicate the unbacked nature of fiat and continue committing financial fraud instead of the usual federally sanctioned regulatory fraud
I really appreciate that explainability was taken into consideration during the design here.
This article claims that anthropologists, who are the natural and proper authorities charged with gatekeeping in this issue, have a different definition of cargo cults from the one of the popular imagination.

But their their definition is just academically abstracted, that's all, so that it applies to as many cargo cults as possible. The "cargo" ingredient in it, still refers to man-made goods coming from somewhere outside the island!

The specific examples of cargo cults given in the article pretty much exactly fit the the popular understanding, and nicely support the cargo cult metaphor.

Cargo culting refers to magical thinking in regard to some man-made artifacts. In computing it refers to the idea that people use processes, or artifacts like code, without understanding them, hoping for some good outcome, or at least the avoidance of a bad outcome. Personality worship is also implicated in cargo culting. Some great programmers decades ago did something this way in a famous system that was successful so we shall do it that way, and be rewarded with a replication of their success.

Those cargo cults which long proceeded WWII and do not revolve around airplanes and white man's goods, still support the metaphor.

And anyway, no one ever said that the metaphor is based on absolutely all cargo cults, or that it has to be. It is inspired by a few specific instances and their specific events.

Maybe anthropologists should use "cargo cult" more specifically and use a different word for cultural phenomenon resembling cargo cults in which some key ingredients are missing. Perhaps a people who only believe that they will be rewarded with cargo in the afterlife, but otherwise don't worship foreign human beings who wants visited the island as gods, and do not try to make imitation cargo for use as props in rituals intended to attract their second coming, should perhaps not be understood as practicing a "cargo cult". Or perhaps a "weak cargo cult".

The power of a word or term rests in its ability to discern. The more meanings you cram into a word, the less it discerns. Say that we agree that everything is a cargo cult. Then what's the point of using those two words instead of just the word "everything"?

There's also the question of origin. Okay so anthropologists have a definition of cargo cult, under which cargo cults can be identified going back hundreds of years. But might it not be that the popular cargo cult came first, and then the academics try to hijack the word for their own use? What's the story here?

People understood fruits and vegetables before science told them that a tomato is a true fruit, whereas an apple isn't. Therefore, science should have used different words for its categorization, rather than coopting farm-to-kitchen terminology.
Aaron having broken and entered doesn't mean that OpenAI violating copyright law is legal.
One thing you might find helpful is to prototype things with GNU Radio and a GRC flowgraph. I'm not sure that would be useful for running on the ESP32, but you could at least tinker around with signal processing tactics that you could implement on it.
Nice! but... are these graph steps roughly at scale e.g. area of initial blue circle compared to all of human knowledge circle? or the small PhD pimple compared to the blue circle?

If not then can someone (original author or someone else) try to review the steps with roughly realistic average scales assuming surface represent knowledge volume and color complexity spectrum from advanced (indigo) to advanced (red)?

Any candidate to make another pimple on the outer circle?
That’s not what I see from the companies I work with (cloud consulting).

Almost all of them are using LLMs along with “tools” and RAG.
>There are similar cases in other countries where the fire was well controlled.

Did they also have unprecedented 100mph wind gusts, and strong winds blowing for days? It's impossible to fly fire mitigation aircraft in those conditions, and the terrain where the fire was spreading the most were rugged mountain areas, mostly not accessible to firefighters.
>There's no money on the line here, so there's literally no reason for (...)

I assume volunteers working in the sustainability team for free primarily care about non-monetary things.
Dismissing a case doesn't mean that the conduct in question is legal. Not sure why you would think it does.
According to some of these reasons every library should run in its own process too.
Or just remove the parens. They don't really add (much of) anything. (See what I did there?)

Or maybe:

"... trying (unsuccessfully) to succeed..."
Database Trends: A 2024 Review and a Look Ahead
This is a great comprehensive article on the "why" and there are good YouTube videos on the "how." What the article is missing that makes it even better is putting an SSD in which makes it even faster of course. You can get an untested Mac mini G4 for about $60 on eBay and the rest of the parts (SSD, PATA-mSATA adapter, RAM if less than 1 GB, power adapter, any missing screws, clock battery, etc.) will run you another $60 to make the ultimate Mac OS 9 machine. If you're comfortable taking things apart and putting them back together it's not too bad.

A quick tip: be sure to reset the PRAM with command-alt-p-r holding down during restart until you hear 3 chimes. Then while the machine is booting hold down command-alt-o-f and type "reset-nvram" and then "set-defaults" and then "reset-all" (all of this is in open firmware) before installing Mac OS 9 to make sure firmware is in its original state.

I came across this idea of SSD upgrading and installing Mac OS 9 in April 2024 and bought three broken ones to build one for my son. [0] When the first one worked, I ended up figuring, why not just finish the other two and sell them on eBay?

That led me into a hobby business. I've now cleaned, upgraded with SSDs, and sold about 70 of them. The "business" basically breaks even, so it truly is a hobby. In fact I invested so much in inventory buying 90 of them in a lot at the end of 2024 that I am negative right now. I will probably turn a slight profit in 2025. But it's fun and if you want you can buy one from me at:
https://os9.shop

Sorry for the self-promotion, but very relevant!

0: https://x.com/davekopec/status/1795872492386398683
Distro doesn't matter that much, its mostly the desktop environment (panels and settings), and kernel regressions. Like half of my thinkpad fleet now boots into a blank screen due to an regression in the Linux i915 driver.

I used to run Alpine Linux on servers, decided i wanted to change to something less exotic and found that Debian is no less buggy. No idea how to go on.

Windows is consistently worse, i haven't tried macOS as it is not really popular here.
This is simply not true, the UI speed isn't increasing because of systemic bloat, The Great EnFattening. But the throughput gains are immense.

A single NVME SSD can now push over 10GB/s

Main memory bandwidth is now over 100GB on midrange hardware.
I think this gets at the heart of it. People assume that these fires are fought and prevented in the forest/hills by wildland fire fighters but the reality is that individual homeowners can do a lot by clearing brush, etc. (ahead of time,) from their own yards. It's an inconvenient truth because it shifts the responsibility to individuals.

""...Ignitions downwind and across streets are typically from showers of burning embers from burning structures.”
This fundamental misunderstanding has likewise led to a misunderstanding of prevention. No longer is it a matter of preventing wildfires but instead preventing points of ignition within communities by employing “home-hardening” strategies — proper landscaping, fire-resistant siding — and enjoining neighbors in collective efforts such as brush clearing."
Why Larger Language Models Do In-Context Learning Differently?
IMHO good riddance. The VGA console is about as useful as the serial console - your escape hatch when everything else fails. If you're allergic to X11/Wayland, the framebuffer console is much more featureful (it displays cute penguins in the top left corner!)

But (again, IMHO) you can also just run alacritty in cage or a patched dwm. Comes useful when somebody sends you a cat picture.
Sitting on my desk constantly reminding me what timeless compute (it can still receive software updates for OSX Tiger it runs) and timeless design (need I say more) is.
The first tweet is precisely why any honest person would conclude he's transphobic: those were private accounts and he abused his power as CEO to get that information. He publicly outed her out of pure transphobic spite, presumably hoping that Twitter's merry bands of transphobes would dogpile her there and everywhere else they could find her. (I also heard that he repeatedly misgendered her in a now-deleted Tumblr post, but I couldn't find a screenshot.)

"You can't proooove that he's transphobic, and you can't prooooove that he outed her because he wanted transphobes to harass her" yeah well we're not in court, this is a social matter. I am an individual human who has to make low-information judgments about other members of my species, and my low-information judgment of Mullenweg is that he's a transphobe. It is impossible for me to see an honest argument to the contrary. I am aware that dishonest arguments come quite easily:

- "innocent before proven guilty!"

- "what about the tweet where he said 'trans people are okay I guess'"

- "that was 8 months ago, when he was a wee 40-year-old lad, he's grown since then"

But considering Mullenweg is a horrifically bad person in many other areas of his life, I am quite confident he also sucks when it comes to civil rights.
The fire quickly grew into a firestorm due to the 50 mph+ winds. Southern California is known for this phenomenon of dry winds that blow from the desert called the Santa Anas. They only affect certain areas, so the perfect combination of the winds + being in a fire prone area + having record rainfall the year before + being in a drought caused the fire to burn crazy fast with access to lots of brush (fuel).

If you don't stop it within the first 5 min, it quickly gets out of control. There's so much stuff to burn.