skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For now - we're not there at all.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s a question of a couple of years at most. Gwern, who has a good track record of predictions, think so too. We’re pretty much here.

I arrived at the same conclusion independently. Not because I’m a genius like Gwern and Could Work at a Big Lab if I Wanted, but because it is in fact pretty obvious. People focus way too much on the current limitations of current models, not enough on their strength. The core strength of current LLMs are already superhuman (speed, memorization, ability to navigate long context) by a significant margin. Their overall ability is heavily constrained by their weaknesses (mainly planning — hallucinations is a non-story). There are known solutions to this. AlphaZero is "training to plan" and predates GPT-2, you just have to adapt it to the LLM paradigm. What did you think AlphaProof was ? An idle experiment just for fun ?

The only hope now is that there’s some non-identified and non foreseen weakness, where LLMs currently sit well below human-level but has been obscured by the lack of planning, that significantly limit capabilities of the planned models in the same way that planning limits current models, and that has no obvious solution. But at that point that’s just Copium.

Or that we collectively fucking wake up, realize that "we’re pretty much there" and "we don’t want this", and do something. But at that point that’s just Copium too: the governing elites got the memo and are okaying this (cue Andreessen on the Trump camp, the last Biden EO ordering to fast-track AI-scale datacenters on the Democrats camp).

The big issue is that people who don’t want this (the vast majority of people I believe) think we’re not here, and people who think we’re here want this (the labs, the two big parties).

It does not helps that usual human irrationality kicks in heavily on this topic. "I don’t like AI and its consequences" => "I enjoy disparaging AI and consuming content disparaging AI" (look at those 10 epic fails of ChatGPT !) => "I’m going to inflate their weaknesses and downplay their strength" (I can’t believe it can’t count the r in strawberry !) => "Yes AGI is Very Bad News but it’s not there, have you looked at where we’re at ?". Expect a lot of Pikachu Faces in the following months/years.

2028 was the initial timeline given by, I believe, Shane Legg. He recently said he’s on track. You better give some credence to that or wake up with some very, very nasty surprise very soon.
From your link:

"The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute,"

Also from the link:

"However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute."

But relevant questions are: Is that salute normalized now? Is the era between WW2 and present going to end?
Was this solved? Is this context only a cancellation flag or does it do something more? The obvious solution for a cancellation trigger would be to have cancellation as an optional second argument. That's how it's solved in e.g. C#. Failing to pass the argument just makes it CancellationToken.None, which is simply never cancelled. So I/O without cancellation is simply foo.ReadAsync(x) and with cancellation it's foo.ReadAsync(x, ct).
I still remember his “The Art of Code” talk, highly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U
> And polio is largely cured from this generation, and vaccines now exist that prevent diseases that once killed infants

Well, that depends if RFKjr and his lunatics get control of the HHS[0][1]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/rfk-jr-aaron...

[1] https://www.protectourcare.org/experts-say-deadly-samoan-mea...
IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia.

Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.

For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
I saw the BBC's article "Elon Musk's gesture at Trump rally draws scrutiny" - way to downplay a Nazi salute, BBC.

Musk has been promoting extreme right-wing opinions, conspiracies and outright lies for quite a while now and he's obviously seeing the Trump presidency as a key success in his plot for world domination, so he no longer needs to hide his fascism/racism etc.

Why other organisations are seeking to downplay actual Nazi salutes must be because they are scared of the power imbalance and seek to appease (hint: that never works).
Are we miscounting GDP?

That is, if someone goes out for work instead of caring for relatives, not only do we count their work as GDP, we also count the person who has to stand in for them.

So that's a large increase in paid work done, but a minimal amount of extra wellbeing generated. Especially if, say, each of them now has to drive 45 minutes each way.

If, as you say, care is paid for by other people working, are there interventions - either state or individual - to reduce the need to consume it? Obviously some people are just unlucky, and live a long time in a state of total incapacity (hence the "dementia tax" rhetoric), is it possible to incentivise people to do things that mean they need less of it - by spending a greater proportion of their lifespan in good health, say?
What's wrong with PR now?
> - It's true that many join academia because they didn't know what else they could do.

This is really the root of most other problems mentioned.
sell all your unnecessary worldly possessions, buy a landstead, take up farming.
Me i dropped a bunch of dont allows for different bots, as many as i could find.
Sorry, this is wrong. They'd be based on long range UAV's - not short range FPVs. Ukraine have been building about half a dozen types of different long range drones and are producing a good number of those every day now (some with jets making them analogous to cruise missiles). They're much more expensive than a cheap FPV with an RPG warhead strapped to it.
Well, of course people would like OTC meds for erectile dysfunction. Unfortunately, Viagra and friends must be controlled due to dangerous side-effects. But most people won't ever understand that. They'll just say it's the bad docs wanting more money...
FOSDEM is a conference for open source software, possibly one of the most functional demonstrations of anarchy working in the modern world. Seems only fitting to me.
My first (almost) thought was "Ok, looking at the llama, where's the quality boost?" I think the explanation is probably in how LLM are trained. Even without knowing deeply the internals, I suspect that it's the compression of information so to simplify you can't make 8GB data contain all the facts of a "bigger" normalized relational database. So they keep the facts present everywhere and often drop rare facts. For example, a fact "SQL was invented at IBM", this fact can be found everywhere, in books, web sites, comments. You don't need access to copyrighted books to acquire this fact. But a first-person account of someone who worked at IBM at that time is probably can be found in a couple of books, but due to "compression", it will be gone anyway
Complexity has always been less respected the more it is separated from the experiences of the average person; or more personally, your own experiences. Unfortunately, that's the very nature of complexity itself. Dependencies increase instead of decrease in the hopes of scaling, saving time and money, or even providing a slightly better product. As positive as those efforts sound, they also make the failure cases worse.

The only people to respect with regards to complexity are those dealing with inherent complexity -- especially when they're building more digestible abstractions, and those working to reduce complexity due to having a substantial understand of it. It can be rather difficult to distinguish between inherent complexity and incidental complexity though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1i68puj/have_we_l...

Here is a video. Reference included.

Notice the vigor with which he performs the action, notice how the fingers in his hand start spread out but by the time he's erected his hand they are held together as in the reference video.
Hey, just wanted to come back from the rabbit hole you lead me to the entrance of and thank you for introducing me to lenses in the context of code; I was unfamiliar.
Open Source Alternative to Vercel, Netlify and Heroku
You could be right. I don't have enough knowledge in the field and I'm not sure 'trend predictions' work that well. Why aren't there autonomous vehicles already? Why does Waymo have to deploy them city by city? When I learned to drive I learned to drive - you didn't have to teach me how to drive in L.A , then San Francsisco, Then Pheonix etc. Is it only about Waymo being careful or are these things not yet good enough at generalizing?
We will see soon enough.
Personally I learned to let go - I don't have a dog in this fight. Whatever has to happen will happen, there are pros and cons for all of us in this (con: losing your job. pro: the best health care you can imagine. the best education for your kids. etc etc).
>The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find.

Indeed, for me it is: whats the point of working in some random ass startup making yet another crud app and/or with 100 users when you can go to faang and work at giant scale or go to work in semiconductors and work on very interesting, deeply technical stuff?

Sure, there are interesting startups, but they usually dont go big like uber for x and so on
Yes, but that's a problem of bad people, not guns.

Either way, the end result is that I have to identify myself at a store to move some eSIMs and many are simply not transferable (particularly from Airalo)
Doesn't this create a situation where the old rely on their own younger generation to support them?

And therefore inequality between older people who have families (or have families that care about them) and those that don't?

I can see this particularly being a problem for countries like the UK which has long encouraged "upwardly-mobile" people to move away from their towns of origin in pursuit of economic opportunity, leading to families being widely dispersed across a country which, despite its fairly small size, is not especially fast to travel around.
This is better to understand the context of the protest

""No billionaires at FOSDEM" - https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...

Also these are the recommended actions:

"To maintain the peaceful nature of our protest and minimize the disruption to FOSDEM generally, we ask participants to strictly adhere to the following instructions:

Do not touch anyone else, or anyone else’s property, for any reason.

Do not engage in intimidation.

Remain quiet and peaceful throughout the demonstration.

When the protest ends, disperse peacefully and in a timely manner.

Leave the room the way you found it. "
'Deep state' could also be called 'permanent state' and means those unelected entities which hold power through changes of government.

Victoria Nuland is an example. She worked for six presidents and ten secretaries of state over 30+ years, always promoting the same war agenda. She has worked in concert with her husband Robert Kagan, who has worked as an adviser to several governments and think tanks. These people and organisations are all part of the deep state, aka security state, aka military industrial complex, as forewarned by President Eisenhower on his departure from office.
To be honest, on this I understand what gp mean, I might be sexist for this, but to me decisions to have children is a burden put mostly on the mother (the decision only, not the 40 years after that).

I didn't want any child, but clearly stated that I would support any choice she made, and any children we would have would have my love and support. I don't bear any social pressure to have kids, I don't get pregnant, i don't feel any kind of desire to have children (I used to be a youth camp counselor, my ego about being a role model was well filled by the time I was 25).

Anyway, since the choice is primarily on the mother (as it should be), it stands within reason that the formation and remuneration are given to them in priority.
The scale of the Carnegie library program is pretty incredible. My dad’s library as a kid was a Carnegie library in central Iowa. The libraries near where I live in Dublin, Ireland are Carnegie libraries.
This is missing another big reason: we're not just writing this stuff and casting it out into the void, fulfilling weird demands of weird space aliens somewhere. No, much more than producers, we're also - like everyone else - users of software written by others, too.

I don't do much frontend work these days, and when I need something, vanilla JS and CSS serve me just fine. Yet, I get angry or saddened by new things in web space all the time, and yes, sometimes even "offended to the bone that this new generation of developers is just running in circles" - that's because even if I don't work with frontend myself, I will be on the receiving end of all the bloated webshit garbage. Will be, and am - like everyone, I already am drowning in kaka felota.

Take SPAs: yes, they have a place, and frameworks can be used correctly and efficiently. But they mostly aren't, and instead, almost every single website I use - news sites, bank sites, online stores, e-mail services, blogs - they are all now steaming pile of half-broken garbage. Shmaybe they look cuter, and are easier to use with fat fingers on a tiny phone, but they're also less functional than generation before, and take longer to do anything. We've been through couple iterations of SPA-fication, and each one made things worse.

No, the true reason I get angry about new tech, is that new tech is shit, and I'm going to be force-fed that shit, because everything is going digital, everything is being written by juniors, and the market at this stage is structurally unable to make things better, or take feedback. So each time I see a new turd get a spike in popularity, I know that one year for now, I will be suffering at the receiving end of it.
> You believe Elon Musk is somehow showing support for the National-Socialist party of the German working class?

That's a bizarre comparison. Are you deliberately trying to build a straw-man and associate a known extreme right-wing, Nazi salute with socialism? You do realise that the Nazi party were not at all socialist - they called themselves that to trick and lie to the Germans.
> I feel like "Complexity" is the wrong word here. [...] I'd argue its more to do with the nature of how large codebases morph over time as they're retrofitted to do more usercases. Its a lot easy in the short term to just hack in the functionality you need into an existing codebase, instead of rewriting the entire thing from scratch every time. This comes at the cost of maintainability and leads to a lot of headaches in the long term, as systems that where never designed to work together clash in unexpected ways.

Rich Hickey separates complexity into two parts[0], accidental and intentional (IIRC). Intentional complexity is complexity that stems from the domain of your problem, there isn't much you can do to manage it, DNA splicing will be complex no matter what you do, for example.

The other part is accidental complexity, which is complexity you could deal with, but for whatever reason choose not to right now, as you touch on in your comment. This eventually snowballs into a huge spaghetti monster as you pile hacks on top of hacks.

There is a (famous at this point) talk from Hickey where he dives much deeper into how he sees complexity, which happens to be a really good pitch for Clojure, but I first saw it before I knew Clojure, and the perspective applies to software in general, so no Clojure knowledge needed.

[0] - "Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
The the introduction of Python 3 wasn't a mistake. The mistake was discontinuing Python 2.

Just look at how rust does it. Rust 1.0 code still works in the latest version of rustc, you just need to set the project to the Rust 2015 edition. You can even mix-and-match editions, as each crate can have a different edition. Newer versions of rustc will always support all previous editions, and breaking changes are only ever introduced when a new edition is released every 3 years. If the crate is stable, no real reason to upgrade, it will work forever. And if you do need to update a project, you can split it into multiple crates and do it incrementally.

Just imagine how much smoother the python 3 transition would have been if you could transition projects incrementally, module by module as needed.
NodeBB v4.0.0 brings federation between NodeBB instances and the wider Fediverse
We now know the exact amount of solutions OpenAI got beforehand: 23-25%

Because 2% they could have solved without cheating
Well, for Haagen-Dazs, perhaps yes. It’s decent stuff because it’s mostly cream and eggs. Also, smaller packs are not just about COGS: you’ll probably buy more or buy again sooner.
Yes, collective suicide means we no longer have any Climate Change issue. Calling this "a solution" stretches the definition of the word tho.

> If we are to survive and thrive long term we need to become true masters of our environment, and that means we need to be smarter, stronger and more productive.

Yes. I fundamentally agree with that vision. We want this for us. We/Us humans.

If we build AGI we won’t thrive. We won’t be smarter. We won’t be stronger. We won’t be more productive. We won’t be masters of our environment. The AI will be all of this. We’ll just be relegated to passive, helpless spectators.
> was used extensively during the history

As a symbol of fascism.

> average dabbing looks like a seig heil while snizzing

No one being serious would ever confuse the two.
Against the Factory Farming of Creativity
Passing the current user ID/tenant ID inside ctx has been super useful for us. We’re already using contexts for cancellation and graceful termination, so our application-layer functions already have them. Makes sense to just reuse them to store user and tenant IDs too (which we pull from access tokens in the transport layer).

We have DB sharding, so the DB layer needs to figure out which shard to choose. It does that by grabbing the user/tenant ID from the context and picking the right shard. Without contexts, this would be way harder—unless we wanted to break architecture rules, like exposing domain logic to DB details, and it would generally just clutter the code (passing tenant ID and shard IDs everywhere). Instead, we just use the "current request context" from the standard lib that can be passed around freely between modules, with various bits extracted from it as needed.

What’s the alternatives, though? Syntax sugar for retrieving variables from some sort of goroutine-local storage? Not good, we want things to be explicit. Force everyone to roll their own context-like interfaces, since a standard lib's implementation can't generalize well for all sitiations? That’s exactly why contexts we introduced—because nobody wanted to deal with mismatched custom implementations from different libs. Split it into separate "data context" and "cancellation context"? Okay, now we’re passing around two variables instead of one in every function call. DI to the rescue? You can hide userID/tenantID with clever dependency injection, and that's what we did before we introduced contexts to our codebase, but that resulted in allocations of individual dependency trees for each request (i.e. we embedded userID/tenantID inside request-specific service instances, to hide the current userID/tenantID, and other request details, from the domain layer to simplify domain logic), and it stressed the GC.
A third of the Arctic's carbon sink now a source of emissions
> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.

I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
One could argue anything, but one risks being called a fool by everyone.
I believe the main change is just that Hacker News went from being a very specific subset of the population to becoming much more mainstream. Ten years ago it was, at least in my opinion, mostly early adopters of internet technology and in general people who had enough funds that they could fail without being devastated. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional VC route, there's also the indie hackers movement. Those founders typically aren't friends with old money, so they will bring a different perspective on financial risks.
I get the same "We've hidden these results" on Instagram in Spain. But #democrats (plural) works and #fucktrump as well (a user here was saying that was censored but #fuckbiden was allowed)
Yes, I expected the 40% to be much higher too. I guess once you go from PhD to postdoc it changes a bit, but again just looking at the numbers the pipeline gets a lot narrower at each transition.
not sure what is wrong about OPs comment. is there anything false in what he said?
> If you use ctx.Value in my (non-existent) company, you’re fired

This is such a bad take.

ctx.Value is incredibly useful for passing around context of api calls. We use it a lot, especially for logging such context values as locales, ids, client info, etc. We then use these context values when calling other services as headers so they gain the context around the original call too. Loggers in all services pluck out values from the context automatically when a log entry is created. It's a fantastic system and serves us well. e.g.

log.WithContext(ctx).Errorf("....", err)
> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company.

Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge."

But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did that multiple times without much trouble.

> The instability of the postdoc life sucks if and when you want to have a family.

I thought stability was one of the reasons people choose academia. By stability, I mean a supervisor or program that guarantees a steady influx of cash for a certain period of time.

Yeah, but it comes down to what gives you fulfillment. For me, I need challenging work with a reward in pay that matches the effort and academia doesn't seem to fit that curve.
> Czechoslovak politians *just decided* to give up to Hitler

"I think you will find it's a bit more complicated than that".

Sir is falling into the trap (alarmingly common in the USA) of simplifying history to the point of meaninglessness. Indeed, you would do well to understand why the UK and France ceased their support for Bohemia in an act of appeasement; an act that certainly wasn't taken lightly and was itself done for complex reasons, partly arising from the trauma of the Great War that was still fresh in many minds.
Haha. That's you characterisation of the ADL? Pretty sure their funding comes from donors rather than the government.
what does it mean to "leave" acadamia? Like it somehow goes away if your not part of an institution?
No, but it seems like we'll need ways to co-ordinate resistance against the oppressors.
Google Releases Experimental AI Reasoning Model – InfoQ