skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As an alternative, they continually beg me to install a telemetry device in the OBD port in exchange for lower premiums. But their incentive is so obviously to use the data against me in the event of a claim ("ohho! 31 in a 30 zone! Denied!") that I see no reason to do so.

So your incentive is to pay less money, and their incentive is to pay less money. They figured out a way to do that and still be in business. Obviously, some people might value driving over the speed limit more than the lower premium.

> I suspect that if laws were passed requiring use of telemetry and dashcams all over, all that would really happen is that rates would rise to reflect new data on how badly most of us drive, and claim denials would skyrocket.

You don’t think people would change their behavior if their actions were likelier to result in consequences to their bank account and/or prison time?

Almost everyone is distracted driving to the point that personal motor vehicles are, by far, the leading morbidity and mortality risk for people, especially children.

We go scorched earth when kids are kidnapped or otherwise at risk, but for personal cars, we explicitly look the other way when we have a way to make kids safer.

Quite the double standard people have when they want to break the rules themselves.
Useful documentation is impossible for the developer to write - they are too close to the code and so don't understand what the users (either api users or end users) need to know. Developers agonize over details that users don't care about while ignoring as obvious important things users don't know.
Apple is both well aware and marketing it, as seen at https://www.apple.com/my/newsroom/2024/10/apples-new-macbook...

Quote:

"It also supports up to 128GB of unified memory, so developers can easily interact with LLMs that have nearly 200 billion parameters."
The usual caveat applies. I'm okay they make money from it until they start using that money against the rest of us.
> If fact checking doesn't necessarily "always work", then you should not call it fact checking. That is already a great reason why Community Notes are better.

You can still call it fact checking, just as you can still call air travel by that name even though a very small percentage of planes crash. Suppose the fact checkers had a 0.1% false positive rate and a 0% false negative rate. For every 1,000 pieces of reported content they review which should be left up, they take one down, and they never leave anything up that should be taken down. Wouldn't we say that the system, broadly speaking, works and has value? Even though it doesn't always work?

Do you think Community Notes will "always work"?

> Community Notes is from the community, not from Facebook, so not directly influencable by the government.

It wouldn't work like this. Meta still own the platform, profit from it, and are responsible for it.

Governments will always want to talk to Meta about the material they host, because Facebook reaches millions of people. Sometimes the governments will have a valid case, like when material on Facebook can be linked to inciting genocide[1]. And sometimes they won't, and will be trying to pressurise Facebook for political or self-serving reasons. The point is, those governments will not simply be satisfied and go away if Meta throw their hands in the air and say "Sorry, but we fired the fact checkers and have no control over the material on our platform. It's up to the community, talk to them."

If Meta are trying to solve the government interference problem, the solution is to strengthen their fact checking and moderation systems. Then they'd be able to push back and say that actually no, they are confident that the content on Facebook is appropriate and can credibly stand by it. Abdicating responsibility is just going to get them into more trouble.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Facebook_con...
So now you’re trying to say we should just go back to 1930’s New York (and prisons!) and tell them they should just stop forming those ethnic gangs because clearly they don’t actually need to do that, and they’d be better off without them?

Hey, you’re welcome to if you want. Time travel may be hard, but I’m sure someone would let you into your local Folsom equivalent if you asked.
Mastodon and Bluesky and various Discourse forums.

Reluctantly on Reddit as the current activitypub alternatives don't feel quite right (emulating the chaos of Reddit).

Even more reluctantly on Linkedin, given that there is no real alternative for a decentralized open source "professional" network, which shows how early we are in this transition process.
Occultations can tell you about the atmosphere of the object in front. Depending on the rate at which the background object fades can tell you about atmospheric density, composition etc. If it disappears suddenly it indicates there may be no atmosphere.
They will learn their lesson how exactly? By getting money for free from VCs?

Remember, most of these startups are grifters. Only few of them really believe in their products.
In many cases it wasn’t backed at all, they then bundled those garbage loans up with backed ones and sold them as solid investments out the door as fast as possible. It was fraud, plain and simple.
The US government has told Google to query its location database for any device in the vicinity of certain crimes before. There's no way they're not trying to get Apple to do the same.

If Apple designed they'd crypto system as well as they claim that's not viable at this moment in time, but the government can certainly try.
It has been ages since I worked with Common Lisp, so I wonder: Would it be possible / make sense to have version control into the lisp image?
I have never heard of this used to determine who is at fault in a collision. Does that happen? Also, video would be a tremendous help for ascribing proper blame, so why wouldn’t that be required?

When airbags came out, video recording was expensive, but that has long not been the case.
I'm disappointed that people upvote something that so consistently fails. I've tried at least 5 times, never did it ever work. Not once.
Yeah, naming is hard. Once installing it I’ll forget about this editor
There are several assumptions here tangled together here

1) Use is sufficient, but not necessary for impact. Theory of relativity, a lot of QM, etc has had only uses in real world edge cases, but have enormous value. The value function for impact, so to speak, includes more than just use.

2) There is the structure of academia and it's incentives, the average behavior of people in it, and it's outcomes. I don't necessarily have to bow to it's incentives, nor behave like the average person in there. Academia is also sufficiently large and fractal that you can find people less interested in the incentives and more in some thing they obsesses about.

PL has had some interesting, although sometimes unheard of, real world uses. CUDA for example. A significant chunk of PL now focuses on ML. Awhile back a company called Monoidics got acquired my Facebook for work on static bug finding with formal methods. Rust has been pretty influenced by PL concepts. New languages like WASM are formally verified from the ground up, and there are exciting opportunities for that.

I have considered slinging my resume to more research oriented companies, but hearsay from people is that the golden age is over. Under FOMO and stock market pressure, these companies are eradicating the kind of freewheeling research they used to and dumping money into ML and ML hardware. Not to mention it's a bit of a dice roll and a circus to get a job at such companies nowadays as a fresh graduate.
You could argue intent. The model has no intent to infringe. No mens rea.

AI models will get broad federal immunity is my prediction for 2025.

I'll bet DOGE coins on it.
The Obesity Blame Game
Before cars, we did not need things like registration, insurance, traffic signals, speed limits, complicated traffic rules, or even sidewalks for pedestrians or cyclists.

All these things needed to be created solely because cars are extremely dangerous machinery, like forklifts.

Saying that cyclists should need liability insurance because drivers need liability insurance is like saying that it's unfair that people who lift boxes by hand don't need licenses when people who operate forklifts do.

It isn't required because bicycles simply aren't anywhere near as dangerous to people other than the person riding them as cars and the conditions that necessitates these requirements being created for cars don't exist for bikes in the first place.
> you're not experiencing anything of value that you couldn't have experienced back home

That's an incredibly arrogant view of the world and doesn't match my experience. But you need time.

In particular when you experience the world by sailboat, you get a glimpse of its true size.
The thing is, what do we do with the bitter lesson once we’re essentially ingesting the entire internet? More computation runs the risk of overfitting and there just isn’t any more data. Is the bitter lesson here telling me that we’ve basically maxed out?
So? Yes you need some duplicatin but it forces you to put information useful to api users where they won't have to wade through pages of information not of interest to them. eventually they may need to read the source but a lot of common questions are answered by the header and so the small cost to make them is worth it.

of course javadoc can answer the same questions but then you have to run it.
Can NOSTR handle 100 million daily active users?
I use Reddit, but very cautiously. The echo chamber effect is so strong over there and critical thinkers are not exactly rewarded, so many subreddits develop beliefs that are completely contrary to what’s going on in the real world. It’s also heavily astroturfed, which makes the problem worse as disinformation is constantly being injected. Sticking to subreddits about cooking, coding, landscaping, etc is usually fine.
>I can't even think of when there was rationing in the west? Shortly after the war? At least the current grandparent generation seems to have childhood memories of that.

there was a pandemic a few years ago in which various western countries experienced shortages and in some cases rationing of some things.

There is rationing of water usage in many parts of the world, including parts of Western countries in which people live in water constrained areas, although that rationing is for garden usage - not drinking water.

I'm sure similar things can be thought of.

Obviously you don't mean those forms of rationing, you seem to mean large rationing of many different necessities and materials. But the fact that these rather minor forms of rationing exist in contrast to that in place during WWII does indicate that the system is not as able to handle all needs as well as you and a few other people in this thread seem to believe.

on edit: added word "exist"
Find a real problem and solve it cheaply, or solve it so much better than anyone else that your high price is worthwhile to enough people.

Don't focus on the method of solving the problem until you have identified the problem and all the current solutions and avoidances.
its a cost function,
In that case:

cost = 2.828^(2*(bits/512))

It didn't "square the cost", it doubled the number of bits to find the cost, I just skipped a load of the math.
I think the core problem at hand for people trying to use AI in user-facing production systems is "how can we build a reliable system on top of an unreliable (but capable) model?". I don't think that's the same problem that AI researchers are facing, so I'm not sure it's sound to use "bitter lesson" reasoning to dismiss the need for software engineering outright and replace it with "wait for better models".

The article sits on an assumption that if we just wait long enough, the unreliability of deep learning approaches to AI will just fade away and we'll have a full-on "drop-in remote worker". Is that a sound assumption?
A human does not need billions of driving hours to learn how to drive competently. The issue with current method is not quality of data but methodology. More computation might unlock newer approaches that are better with less and worse quality data.
May be I'm being dumb but isn't the AI approach somewhat like brute force hacking of password? I mean humans don't learn that way - yes we do study code to be better coders but not in the way AI learning does?

Will someone truly discover a way to start from fundamentals and do better not just crunch zillions of petabytes faster and faster.

Or is that completely wrong? Happy to stand corrected
A company that has internal customers that go to bed every day. Bankers, underwriters, etc
There's only one core problem in AI worth solving for most startups building AI powered software: context.

No matter how good the AI gets, it can't answer about what it doesn't know. It can't perform a process for which it doesn't know the steps or the rules.

No LLM is going to know enough about some new drug in a pharma's pipeline, for example, because it doesn't know about the internal resources spread across multiple systems in an enterprise. (And if you've ever done a systems integration in any sufficiently large enterprise, you know that this is a "people problem" and usually not a technical problem).

I think the startups that succeed will understand that it all comes down to classic ETL: identify the source data, understand how to navigate systems integration, pre-process and organize the knowledge, train or fine-tune a model or have the right retrieval model to provide the context.

There's fundamentally no other way. AI is not magic; it can't know about trial ID 1354.006 except for what it was trained on and what it can search for. Even coding assistants like Cursor are really solving a problem of ETL/context and will always be. The code generation is the smaller part; getting it right requires providing the appropriate context.
Is it possible to be a professor without a PhD? I would like to teach at a college level but the PhD path seems so risky to me to take a pay cut for years and you might not get the degree, and not a get a job.
When everything is a choice, the choices you make are what you are, correct?
And how will that not be important enough to leave a voice message about?
We’re nowhere near ingesting the whole internet.

Though personally, I think we’re missing whatever architecture / mathematical breakthrough will make online learning (or even offline incremental, I.e. dreams) work.

At that point we could give the AI a robot body and train it of lived experience.
>advisor might push to publish

That's fair. I'm just cautiously eyeing the likelihood of coming up with something publishable that's not a going through the motions kind of thing.
I think an entity might be unable to mean things (or some things) but still able to understand what they mean. Kinda-trivial example: I cannot say and mean "I have a pain in the sixth finger on my right hand" because like most people I have only five fingers on my right hand, but I can understand reasonably well what it means. Using indexicals like this is a bit of a cheat, but you did the same in your very first example so I don't feel too bad about it. It's not so clear whether this can happen without them, but arguably it could; e.g., you might take some view along the lines of "statements are only meaningful when they occur within some sort of community" and then an entity isolated from such communities couldn't say-and-mean things, but might still understand what things mean.

Anyway: you say (if I understand you right) that if those concepts diverge the only one you actually care about is agents meaning things. I think that's a mistake, because a lot of the questions we have reason to care about with today's AIs are not about that. Will AIs be able to do all our jobs better and cheaper than we can? That's about their external behaviour and how it relates to the world. Will AIs gain vast power and use it in ways that are very bad for us? Ditto. Will AIs enable new technological innovations that make us all much better off? Ditto. No one will be saying as the killbots destroy their cities "well, this isn't so bad; at least the machines don't really know what it is they're doing". No one will be saying as they enjoy the fruits of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism "you know, this whole thing feels empty because the machines that make all this possible don't really understand, they just behave as if they do".

If a melon+string+ball arrangement is a faithful enough model of the solar system and it somehow enables me to send spaceships to Uranus, or to discover that orbits are elliptical when I hadn't known it before, or something, then that's a thing of great value.

Your comment about children imitating adults sounds as if you haven't actually taken in the conditions I proposed, because children imitating what their parents say cannot in fact have the property I called "richness". If I talk to a child and they have learned to say some things about stars by listening to their parents, it will not help them when I ask them about something they haven't heard their parents say.

(One can imagine a situation where the child "passes" this test by just relaying everything I say to the parent and then imitating what they say back to me. But the point there isn't that the child is imitating, it's that the child is not really part of the conversation at all, I'm just talking to the parent. And it is clear that nothing like that is happening with AI systems.)

You may imagine that you make your argument more convincing by finishing it up with "anyone to whom this is not obvious is obviously religiously obsessed with some converse belief", but to me at least the opposite is the case.
Using a Chessboard as a Calculator [video]
The mistake this post makes is thinking that sole engineering effort is what makes startup win.

Most of the things you build will end up in the trash can anyway. But what matters is what you get while doing them, like domain knowledge, improved processes, actual customers..

If you are ok to scrap your code in order to integrate a better model then fine. Since your model is better and does not need all the software around it, it will take 10x less time to re-do what you have, leaving you more time for things that also matter, like sales.
This is the best possible answer to Internet-based negativity! I wish you luck in your PhD :)
Seems intellectually dishonest (given how his theory of universal grammar is all about indispensible biological factors in human languages).
I think this is quite a fair commentry (although I quite like the Nix language personally) - as a nixpkgs developer even I don't use NixOS on the desktop. For me it shines on servers and development environments.
Sure but… he could technically get that or not? If somebody wanted to really punish him they could push it to what? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

Because some people really wanted to punish him.

I am just reacting to the downplaying that he would get 6 months in jail. Like he was some weak person for commiting suicide because of that.
What kind of area were you in?

It's hard to believe this 'sucking up to those with money' thing applies everywhere, though it's easier to imagine it applies in certain domains.
my gut instinct suggests that the ballast powder would shift about while being towed and cause unexpected motion, especially if it's hinged at one end. You might end up with it self-deploying with a runaway effect if enough of the weight moved to the loose end
A compiler can still have access to the internal layout in C via link-time optimization.
QuantaLogic: A ReAct Framework for Building Advanced AI Agents
QuantaLogic: A ReAct Framework for Building Advanced AI Agents

QuantaLogic is a Python-based ReAct (Reasoning & Action) framework bridging advanced AI models with practical business applications. It integrates LLMs with a robust tool system, enabling AI agents to understand, reason about, and execute complex tasks through natural language.

Key Features:

Universal LLM Support: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, etc. via LiteLLM
Secure Tool System: Docker-based code execution and file manipulation
Real-time Monitoring: Web interface with SSE events
Enterprise Ready: Comprehensive logging, validation and error handling
Extensible: Custom tools and agents via Python SDK
Well. We were working on a search engine for industry suppliers since before the whole AI hype started (even applied to YC once), and hit a brick wall at some point were it got too hard to improve search result quality algorithmically. To understand what that means: We gathered lots of data points from different sources, tried to reconcile that into unified records, then find the best match for a given sourcing case based on that. But in a lot of cases, both the data wasn’t accurate enough to identify what a supplier was actually manufacturing, and the sourcing case itself wasn’t properly defined, because users found it too hard to come up with good keywords for their search.

Then, LLMs entered the stage. Suddenly, we became able to both derive vastly better output from the data we got, and also offer our users easier ways to describe what they were looking for, find good keywords automatically, and actually deliver helpful results!

This was only possible because AI augments our product well and really provides a benefit in that niche, something that would just not have been possible otherwise. If you plan on founding a company around AI, the best advice I can give you is to choose a problem that similarly benefits from AI, but does exist without it.
I don't think any service that you listed can be called a "community"?

Yes, there are communities hosted on them, but they're just services.
> citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025.

When it comes to Mullenweg, I am always impressed that there is often some worse behaviour mentioned in the article...
Well, I thought Reddit could be HN for other topics. I was wrong. It's mostly an echo chamber there, apart from the heavily moderated subs that normally start with r/Ask{Economists/Historians/Linguistics/etc}

It still has some use as a personal news feed, but most of the comments are worthless.

There's a few math and science subs that are a bit like StackOverflow back when that was still useful.
Right at the top of the article, the author outlines the requirement was that it must be usable within vim.
I only use X/Twitter, now that Elon is in charge and cleaned it up.
youtube thereof https://youtu.be/7BGtVJ3lBdE
Yeah seems like context is the AI version of cache invalidation, in the sense of the joke that "there's only 2 hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things". It all boils down to that (that, and naming things)
That has been done in the past and was never widely supported. But the landscape is now slightly different. One approach might be to use ASDF (the most popular systems management tool), which then would need to be upgraded to use versions (and ideally have it integrated into a repository mechanism -> Git or similar... Also what are versions in a decentralized world?). ASDF operations then would need to be able deal with version numbers.

A Lisp image would then know/track which versions of what code it has loaded/compiled/... Version information would be stored with the other source files.
Care to share any details? What country are you studying in, and what's the subject area?
You put words in my mouth.
love it when a 25 year old founder says we have been here multiple times in the past
We've had offshore wind for more than 20 years, how are those doing?
Not an issue for Common Lisp, you can use whatever you like, but interacting with a REPL gives you superpowers.
How Corn Syrup Took over America
Any evidence that this approach works? Are people who do this able to move from the PhD to a solid position afterward that they could not have had without the PhD?
More than 60 German universities and research institutions leave X