skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Epidemiology and politics are pretty much the poster children of systems[0], next to their eldest sibling, economics. Life and experience may trump abstract knowledge dumbly applied, but alone it won't let you reason at larger scales (not that you could collect any actual experience on e.g. pandemics to fuel your intuition here anyway).

A part of learning how to model things as systems is understanding your model doesn't include all the components that affect the system - but it also means learning how to quantify those effects, or at least to estimate upper bounds on their sizes. It's knowing which effects average out at scale (like e.g. free will mostly does, and quite quickly), and which effects can't possibly be strong enough to influence outcome and thus can be excluded, and then to keep track of those that could occasionally spike.

Mathematics and systems-related fields downstream of it provide us with plenty of tools to correctly handle and reason about uncertainty, errors, and even "unknown unknowns". Yes, you can (and should) model your own ignorance as part of the system model.

--

[0] - In the most blatant example of this, around February 2020, i.e. in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic going global, you could quite accurately predict the daily infection stats a week or two ahead by just drawing up an exponential function in Excel and lining it up with the already reported numbers. This relationship held pretty well until governments started messing with numbers and then lockdowns started. This was a simple case because at that stage, the exponential component was overwhelmingly stronger than any more nuanced factor - but identifying which parts of a phenomenon dominate and describing their dynamics is precisely the what learning about systems lets you do.
Hey now, my shitcoins give me joy. Now the gaming industry...
> The other three have shown they'll instantly bend the knee to whomever is in power, and that's exactly the same thing people are worried that Deepseek is doing.

100%
When drunk, they all speak the same indistinguishable mumble.
Some of the interfaces can realtime check websites
Rolls Royce, I believe
Eager to see what HN favors on this one.
About the security content of iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3
Is AI expanding horizontally or vertically? My understanding is that smarter models dominate over hordes of dumber ones
In the example you compare something with 20 million daily users to the energy usage of 25.000 homes. I feel like comparisons like this mostly work (and feel scary) because we don't really grasp how much bigger 20 million really is. It feels a bit like scaremongering to me (without providing context of AI energy use vs other online activities/services).

Anyhow, another perspective is given here: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-b...
This piece aligns more with my view on AI and its energy usage.
This is one of my main concerns with the current trend of shoving AI into everything.

Yes, it's a cool new technology and very useful for some things.

No, it's not a great fit for literally everything and by adding it to things where it doesn't actually add value, we're not only making products worse, we're also burning down our already dying planet for no reason.
"everything from development assistance to military aid."

Was written twice. I appreciated that.
The world has been talking about Bloom's 2 sigma study for ages now... AI tutors are clearly a better option as far as learning is concerned. Because Harvard's (and other Ivy league schools included) thing is just the credential you get!
Did you try loading this in your own browser and look at the console? I get one warning and five errors:

* Cross-Origin Request Blocked.
* None of the "sha512" hashes match the content.
* Loading 3rd party javascript failed.
* Another Cross-Origin Request Blocked.
* Another sha512 hash fails to match.
* Notification permission error
It would bother me so much to track my health on a daily basis. Too much paranoia. It’s like looking at the stock price every day. I much prefer to track my health twice or so per year.
If you watch TheQuantifiedScientist you must have found out by now that optical sensors on the wrist have no chance of ever being accurate enough for health and fitness tracking. No matter how much they massage their algorithms they simply don't have the right sensors at the right positions on the body.

At the same time the fitness features add cost, bulk, the uncomfortable sensor bump and cost battery life. The original Pebble didn't have any of that and in my opinion was better for it. I also see little point in competing with the already existing numerous options for fitness tracking, even if you only look at the ones without a subscription.
I recently picked up the entry-level Forerunner 55 as my first ever "smart watch" and its lack of touch-screen controls and the 5 tactile buttons are my favorite things about it.
At the same time, let's also not rush to hand wave away issues just because "others are likely worse".

Those industries also are an issue, and the question is also applicable there. In fact, the impact of tourism on the environment and how to reduce that impact is one that is on going.

In fact, exactly because it is an emerging technology now is a good time to be conscious about environmental impact. Because it is easier to address issues now than later down the line when it is no longer emerging and already ingrained.
How can you have a bit and a half exactly? It doesn't make sense.
I've thought it before and I'll think it again, renewable energy is not enough on its own; energy consumption should be slashed as well, and datacenters (of any kind) are not helping.
Danielhanchen, your work is continually impressive. Unsloth is great, and I’m repeatedly amazed at your ability to get up to speed on a new model within hours of its release, and often fix bugs in the default implementation. At this point, I think serious labs should give you a few hour head start just to iron out their kinks!
>behave like people, without being taught how

Ok, what does this mean when pretty much all people are taught to be people by the generations before them?

We throw out a number of feral children and see how they grow up in the wilds? Doesn't sound very ethical.
The good news is that these costs are still in exponential decline and will be for at least a few years. The early iterations are costly, but later versions will be cheap.

The bad news is that because we live under Hobbesian capitalism, (a) the high-value target is human labor (i.e., the ruling class is deciding the middle one is an undesirable expense and a competitive threat) rather than ecological harm, and (b) we will probably see Jevons Paradox arms races that almost no one wants as warmongers and billionaires one-up each other.

The technology itself, nevertheless, could very much be a force for good.
I believe the value add is a combination of both factors - ability to measure and (as a consequence) induce more exercise.

An example here is how I made sure my parents are getting their exercise in by making completing their Move rings and 10K steps every day. This pushes them to take a walk in the evening instead of doom scrolling / watching TV.

Another example - Check trends like resting heart rate to see if my body has fully recovered from covid19, SP02 at night indicating potential sleep apnea etc.
My guess: they're somewhat uniquely positioned for the data. With 'the feeds' they're closer to a source/can withstand more. They plan to monetize another way

I'm imagining four rooms of candlelight and collective reading of publications. "War room" is executive-speak for "Important/Urgent Panic" or "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic"

Four war rooms to read a document; so Meta
>Always feels awkward when there are general statements about the group you belong to, which are certainly false at least for you, and possibly for most others you know in that group.

You wrote this and then;

>would expect developers to dislike a web chat, as tech-savvy people generally seem to prefer more lightweight

What?

Web chats are not heavy
People often say Rails is great for startups—perfect for prototyping and moving fast. That’s true, but for me, the real joy comes in maintaining Rails apps. Jumping into the production console, debugging issues, tweaking code on the fly—it’s so satisfying. Yes, it’s risky and you must know what you’re doing. But when done right, support is lightning fast.
and an entire monetary system (just a small by-product)
Comparing to things that do worse is one sure way to never improve though.
Or the thousands of banking systems
Funny that I know quite a few baby boomers and every single one has a pension, a 401k, maybe a roth AND gets social security and medicare.

Not a single one has a college degree. All life long factory workers. Some alcoholics. All they did was show up to the factory job. I know my father hasn't read a book in at least 50 years and he might not have read any in school either.

They have no real expenses either besides going out to eat, vacations and sports gambling.

Legal structures in place so that the nursing home will be on the tax payer if needed.

Anyone of retirement age right now that is not doing well in America REALLY fucked up in life.

Of course, this is all being paid for on the tab of younger people. It is a brilliant system if your old.
Or any leading CEO in recent times. Could of course be the usual deceit, but at least in this case he already delivered.

All I heard from OpenAI was that we need regulation which maybe happen to fit their business interest.
Yes! This goes in my forthcoming blog post "Only on Hacker News..."

Yesterday's entry: "... kind of a mind flex that you noted you used Meta Stories glasses to take that photo."
I now realize that I somewhat rephrased what was said in the blog. How strange!
- Talos Workstations

- Libre engines such as the ones from https://osgameclones.com

- Godot

- Use anything else, there are tons of libre search engines
> On the other hand everyone is concerned about the planet's health

This whole article rests on this faulty premise.

It’s like saying everyone is concerned about shark attacks. Everyone’s not THAT concerned or the beach would be a lot less crowded.

“Planet health” is probably not even in the top 1000 of concerns for most people. They may claim that it is. But then ask what they’ve done about it and they’ll likely say, “I’m just one person what I do won’t matter…”
I don't know why you are being downvoted.
Learning from something that regularly hallucinates info doesn't seem right.
I think AI is a good starting point to learn about what terms to research on your own though.
that was my point, precisely.
I am personally using it for around 50% of my questions about all kinds of things (things I used to Google and get frustrated with bad results). And my wife uses it for about 40% right now, even or recipes and other bits. We both love it.

Work wise about to implement it and see how it does on some work we couldn't scale to humans.
I agree that a single outlier is more stressful - but many times these aren't medical grade devices anyway so the actual data you're looking for is the trend (not the absolute values.

A solution could be to measure it but not really track / visualize it day to day.
No worries! I like talking about this stuff.

Yes, the app uses Noise under the hood, and the way to think about it is a request-response model[1]. Swift makes an async request to the Racket backend, it constructs some data (either by querying SQLite, or making a request to the backend, etc.) and returns a response. If it doesn't retain any of the data, then it gets GC'd. The ser/de is relatively low overhead -- if you try the app and go to Settings -> Support and take a look at the logs after using it a little, that should give you an idea of how long the requests take. The lines that start with `#` refer to Swift->Racket RPCs. Here's an example from my logs:

2025-01-28 13:04:32 +0000 [io.defn.NoiseBackend.Backend] [debug] #006381: waitForAllDownloads()
2025-01-28 13:04:32 +0000 [io.defn.NoiseBackend.Backend] [debug] #006381: took 319µs to fulfill
2025-01-28 13:04:32 +0000 [io.defn.Podcatcher.AppDelegate] [debug] didBecomeActive: finished downloading pending episodes
2025-01-28 13:04:33 +0000 [io.defn.NoiseBackend.Backend] [debug] #006382: getStats()
2025-01-28 13:04:33 +0000 [io.defn.NoiseBackend.Backend] [debug] #006382: took 2ms to fulfill

Some things on the Racket side are long running, like the download manager. It's like an actor that keeps track of what's being downloaded and the progress of each download. Whenever a download makes progress, it notifies the Swift side by making a callback from Racket->Swift. In this example, there is some duplication since both the Swift and Racket sides each have a view of the same data, but it's negligible.

What's not as great from a memory use perspective is how large Racket's baseline memory use is. Loading the Racket runtime and all the app code takes up about 180MB of RAM, but then anything the app does is marginal on top of that (unless there's a bug, of course).

[1]: I did this precisely because, as you say, keeping keeping data in sync in memory between the two languages would be very hard, especially since the Racket GC is allowed to move values in memory. A value you grab at t0 might no longer be available at t1 if the Racket VM was given a chance to run between t0 and t1, so it's better to just let Racket run in its own thread and communicate with it via pipes. Probably, the same would be true for OCaml.
> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.

Guess what. That's cynical too.

> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.

No, it's not. Cynicism is just having the correct model of reality and learning to thrive with it is the best skill you can possibly develop. But the first step is becoming a cynic. Overwhelming bitterness is of course bad, but it's not the end of the road for cynicism, it's just the beginning. A non-cynic can see only this and it looks to him like a cliff that would crush him. Seasoned cynic sits high on top of the cliff of bitterness he climbed, quite happy, having a clear look on both sides. On the world of people who fear cynicism and on the smooth hills on the other side that non-cynics can't possibly fathom.
Not sure why people keep falling into these mental traps.

Regardless of whether the system you're deriding is a "Chinese room", "stochastic parrot", "brute force" or whatever other dericive term-du-jour you want to use, if the system performs the required task, the only thing that actually matters is its cost to operate.

And if that cost is less than paying a human, that human, and society at large is in trouble.
More like Trisquel, Hyperbola or GUIX.
Why?

Are we reaching the point of using more energy than the sun provides to Earth?
UK and DE are much bigger countries. Denmark has half the population of London.

Per capita there are a lot of Nordics in southern Spain and Canarias.
1) to address frontier model company stock valuations (openai for instance): deepseek is creating stuff months after frontier companies. In the AI arms race it might make sense to burn billions to be 3 months ahead (think about how you use that superintelligence to prevent anyone else acquiring it)

2) to address Nvidia valuation: there is no cap to demand on intelligence (or, we're not close). People will never be satisfied with the intelligence achieved and just stop asking for more. So Nvidia will still sell the hardware as the demand side is uncapped.

Unrelated note that I was considering and would like an opinion on: Nvidia is the software play in AI, and TSMC the hardware play. Nvidia has competitors like broadcom/AMD/TPUs but beats out on software. TSMC will be frontier on manufacturing everyone's hardware.
bit too late for that now
I used Teams for years and I like it, really.

I also use Discord privately, so I know the alternative
I always thought that the most flexible approach was:

- good old mutable relational tables

- a separate db to store immutable events (could be the same kind of db you use for business transactions or something fancy like big query)

I feel like mixing both into one has more disadvantages
Is it energy waste if it does something productive? For me, energy waste is energy which, if not used, wouldn't have any noticeable impact.

For instance, most city lights are on even when nobody needs them (using smart activators would allow us not to waste energy.

Energy truly wasted on manufacturing items which are never used, that's wasted.

But generating images, text and code to allow people to make decisions, iterate on ideas, etc. That's not a waste in my opinion, that's actually using energy in one of the most interesting parts of our lives: being creative.
>I live in Sweden and am totally not aware of this trend.

That's probably because the author of the article just made it up after watching a handful of instagram reels or something.
I really wish I could get a dedicated handheld graphing calculator that hasn't had most of the functionality removed due to standardized testing. We live in an age of miracles but having a decent solver on a dedicated device is apparently commercially impossible because it couldn't be sold to students.

I'm just a dude in my shop that occasionally would like to integrate a thing or two without getting coolant on my phone.
Personally I've noticed major changes in performance between different quantisations of the same model.

Mistral's large 123B model works well (but slowly) at 4-bit quantisation, but if I knock it down to 2.5-bit quantisation for speed, performance drops to the point where I'm better off with a 70B 4-bit model.

This makes me reluctant to evaluate new models in heavily quantised forms, as you're measuring the quantisation more than the actual model.
When did you write this in 2005? Apple would like a word with you.
That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.
Right, like this world's largest company called Apple, which gets most of the revenue from its hardware sales. Pixels are not cheap either and given its low specs (Tensor SOC), the per-unit margin has to be quite decent. OTOH, there are significant fixed development costs which you want to spread over as many devices as possible to increase the net margin.

The lackluster value and sales of Google hardware is no master plan, it's a simple incompetency.
Demand isn’t there yet and most AI products are still not fully mature. It will take time.
Is the current civil service system democratic? If so, why?

The US Postmaster General is not appointed by the president. Is it a political office? Is it an important office?

What about the Chair of the Federal Reserve?

We have independent agencies of the United States government specifically to insulate them from presidential control.

Is their existence undemocratic? Or are none of them important?
Money is not cheap anymore and OpenAI costs a lot to run. The longer it takes between impactful releases, the harder it gets for OpenAi to raise money especially in the face of significant competition both nationally, in the open source world and from China
Judges are very much "brainwashed" too, and by design. The judges should apply the law, and the same case should ideally lead to the same verdict regardless of the judge.

With the caveat that this applies to sane legal systems, and not the ones where "making examples" etc are part of the system.
My gut says a lot of attention needs to be given to building a community that focuses on open and reliable access to clean training data.

If a collective/coop of individuals and organizations with storage and network capacity could collaborate with each other to archive and index deduplicated training data that would be huge.

Perhaps this is already happening. I was looking at Red Pajama last year as an example.

Someone like myself could arrange to host 200+TB on high speed storage with a 10G public IP for example, then we get a bunch of us together and hopefully access to training datasets would be decentralized and uncensored in an idea setup.

Is all that in progress and I just need to learn how to join?

Is Red Pajama something to look at again?

Is there someone tracking datasets in detail like HuggingFace has all the models? I know a lot of datasets are on it also, but there is massive duplication.
In a way I would argue that the opposite is true. The less you have, the more devastating it is when you lose it.
The Content Overflow Era – The End of the Long Tail
You can use snapshotting to increase performance of the sequence of transitions approach.
I was skeptical that Bitcoin still uses more than AI but it seems to indeed be the case (or close) - current Energy estimates for Bitcoin recently are at 175 TW/h[0] (though I don't know if those are extra pessimistic or not).

For AI the total consumption is perhaps a little less currently (the figures I find quickly differ) but mostly projected to go over twice that in the next couple of years[1].

0. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

1. https://www.windindustrie-in-deutschland.de/meldungen/electr...
based on information and background they thoroughly gave when releasing their research its pretty easy to put together that it did take them significantly less resources to train this model. only having specific parameters available at a time instead of activating everything all at once is pretty ingenious.

that and they just happened to be undergoing a large scale "cyber attack"
Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.

I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.

I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).

Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.

My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.
> Whenever I prompt: "Do not do anything" It always does <something>.

Yep. A lot of times, the responses I get remind me of Simone in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swBtLPWeKbU

If you end up making a new model, please teach it that less is more and call it "LAIconic".
RadioShack Not Only Still Exists, It Sells Suspiciously Cheap SD Cards
I don't understand one thing.

Why is this submission flagged?
Pakistan Senate votes to ban fake news on social media