skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point Youtube is going to cull the long-tail to save money. It will be an Alexandria burning sort of moment.
Three people in a row and not one of you guys checked out Swift strings before commenting, thus making exactly the mistake I complained about.

Look up Swift strings. Python has 4 types of string literals. Swift has 1. And they are BETTER and more powerful. Cleaner.
I just pulled together a bunch of notes here, since linking to Twitter sucks now (logged out users can't navigate conversations): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
I am not expert but there seems to be an overlap in the article between 'AI' and well ... just software, or signal processing:

- AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.

- AI that creates — or expands — facial recognition databases by scraping images online or from security cameras.

- AI that uses biometrics to infer a person’s characteristics

- AI that collects “real time” biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement.

All of the above can be achieved with just software, statistics, old ML techniques, i.e. 'non hype' AI kind of software.

I am not familiar with the detail of the EU AI pact but it seems like the article is simplifying important details.

I assume the ban is on the purpose/usage rather than whatever technology is used under the hood, right?
as a german, yea pretty much.
That was irony to show X or bluesky, same same, just censorship done by differently opiniated people.

Ofc, it does not work because they are the same.
It is hard to describe how painful was to read about the overwhelming evidence of study manipulation by Masliah and others a few months ago. My father-in-law was diagnosed with this terrible disease in his late fifties, but before that he went through several misdiagnoses, including depression. He lost his job and i am now convinced that it was because he was on early stage of the disease, which affected his memory and ability to communicate. I later learned about this being something under study because apparently is a pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/economy/alzheime... This triggered all kind of troubles as you might imagine.

After that, he went through a violent period and within a few months he could no longer speak or eat on his own. He now wears diapers and we had to hire a professional caregiver to help with his daily routines. Our family impact has been dramatic, we are not a large family so we had to spend a significant amount of resources to help his wife who is his main care giver. We have since received some assistance from the public healthcare system, but it took time, and the support did not keep pace with the rapid progression of his symptoms.

I have seen relatives pass away from other causes but this is by far one of the cruelest ways to die. After a few years of dealing with this disease, i cannot fathom any justification - good or bad - for the massive deception orchestrated, apparently for the sake of Masliag and others' careers. I hope they are held accountable and brought to trial soon for the damage they have caused to society and science.
Yeah, Gab is super nice example of the asymmetry - the sort of behavior right wing Gab members displayed was much much less prominent on the left. So yeah, this is nice example of right wing extreme behaving in the worst way and then complaining it is fair people who behave better are not treated the same. When right wing harasses more, it is ok to kick them out more. The reality was that right wing harasses more, they get kicked, so services would kick off comparatively better behaved left wing people just to make right wing happy. That is right wing bias.

> Twitter wasn't killed by bias, it was killed by a bored billionaire [...] thanks to the usual cycle of enshittification.

He was not bored, he had political project. The enshittificationwas entrirely on Musk personal decisions, not on some impersonal rules.

> If you want to blame someone, blame people who have nothing better to do than to get endlessly polarized over non-issues, thus failing to come together to deal with the issues - and blame the industry that makes money off stoking this fire

I will blame people currently in power and those who voted for them. And nice to complain about polarization while talking about Gab as if it was not the group of people responsible for it.
Use and development.

I know how to make chemical weapons in two distinct ways using only items found in a perfectly normal domestic kitchen, that doesn't change the fact that chemical weapons are in fact banned.

"""The legal framework will apply to both public and private actors inside and outside the EU as long as the AI system is placed on the Union market, or its use has an impact on people located in the EU.

The obligations can affect both providers (e.g. a developer of a CV-screening tool) and deployers of AI systems (e.g. a bank buying this screening tool). There are certain exemptions to the regulation. Research, development and prototyping activities that take place before an AI system is released on the market are not subject to these regulations. Additionally, AI systems that are exclusively designed for military, defense or national security purposes, are also exempt, regardless of the type of entity carrying out those activities.""" - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
Wouldn’tve even noticed otherwise
This is my org, use to be on the Pixel Watch, and I can tell you - all the best talent has already left.
Hmm, I want to add my own files. This is because in my workflow I often turn to the web UI in order to get a fresh context.

I do like the idea of letting the model ask for source code.

It’s all about attention / context.
Exactly. Even if there are midterm elections, Elon and whoever else is benefiting from this behaviour will just spend even more to keep the GOP in power and they’ve proven stunningly good at converting dollars to votes.
The same could be said about a lot of things, like being able to write a functional solution to a leet code puzzle on a black board in front of an audience.

IMHO, an effective interview process should attempt to mimic the position for which a person is applying. Making a candidate jump through hoops is a bit disrespectful.
> took me ~15 minutes to get working

You didn't blindly use it, you still used your expertise. You gave it a high quality prompt and you understood the reply enough to adjust it.

In other words, you used it correctly. It complimented your expertise, rather than replace it.
I immediately want to learn about all these cool things you listed.

I work as a developer and as an interviewer (both freelance). Now I want to integrate your point 3. into my interviews, but not to choose better candidates, just to learn new stuff I never thought about before.

It is your fault that I see now this risk in my professional life, coming at me. I could get addicted to "teach me something".
'Hey candidate, we have 90 minutes. Just forget about that programming nonsense and teach me cool stuff'
Isolation is indeed the vibe on mastodon. And they get upset when they realize that all their posts are publically boradcast over an open websocket api.
I follow people mostly from the JS/TS web development community and have a pretty good balance of tech takes and some lighter life updates/humor in between. I mostly the "mutuals" and "popular with friends" tabs to check things out.

Every now and then there's too much US politics, but it's hard to escape nowadays.
Hinton is not the "father of modern AI." This overlooks the contributions of many others.

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/physics-nobel-2024-plagiari...
I don't know if brains use language to think, but I do believe analogies play an important part in reasoning.

I'm just saying embeddings and analogies aren't the same; equating them is precisely the kind of flawed reasoning Ted Chiang mentions in the article.

Or to answer more directly:

> analogy, in other words, embeddings?

No, analogies aren't embeddings "in other words".
Cursor also just got support this week. Overall it’s still early (MCP only came out a couple of months ago) but seeing multiple clients that allow it to be used with non-Anthropic models, and getting good results, makes me bullish for MCP.

My colleague has working on an MCP server that runs Python code in a sandbox (through https://forevervm.com, shameless plug). I’ve been using Goose a lot since it was announced last week for testing and it’s rough in some spots but the results have been good.
Reminds me of this from 1986 (The Dead Kennedys), talking about the co-option of the Punk counter-culture by the mainstream:

Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.
you are right to call me out. IANAL. on me.
Are they launching a new feature after some other AI got the attention to get the attention back?
Isn't GSI (Project Treble) effectively now a way for Google to force deprecate the vendor bits (ex: HAL/vendor drivers)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116819
Not actively overthrowing democracy and infecting society with an attention addiction industry.
Durable execution is best done at the level of a language implementation, not as a library.

A workflow engine I recently built provided an interpreter for a Scheme-based language that, for each blocking operation, took a snapshot of the interpreter state (heap + stack) and persisted that to a database. Each time an operation completes (which could be after hours/days/weeks), the interpreter state is restored from the database and execution proceeds from the point at which it was previously suspended. The interpreter supports concurrency, allowing multiple blocking operations to be in progress at the same time, so the work to be done after the completion of one can proceed even while others remain blocked.

The advantage of doing this at the language level is that persistence becomes transparent to the programmer. No decorators are needed; every function and expression inherently has all the properties of a "step" as described here. Deterministic execution can be provided if needed. And if there's a need to call out to external code, it is possible to expose Python functions as Scheme built-ins that can be invoked from the interpreter either synchronously or asynchronously.

I see a lot of workflow engines released that almost get to the point of being like a traditional programming language interpreter but not quite, exposing the structure of the workflow using a DAG with explicit nodes/edges, or (in the case of DBOS) as decorators. While I think this is ok for some applications, I really believe the "workflow as a programming language" perspective deserves more attention.

There's a lot of really interesting work that's been done over the years on persistent systems, and especially orthogonal persistence, but sadly this has mostly remained confined to the research literature. Two real-world systems that do implement persistence at the language level are Ethereum and Smalltalk; also some of the older Lisp-based systems provided similar functionality. I think there's a lot more value waiting to be mined from these past efforts.
It was the stuff about Sumerian mythology and its analog virus that made it interesting to me.
https://github.com/posit-dev/shiny-assistant/blob/main/shiny...
Europe: Deepmind. But if you mean EU, practically nobody. A lot of talent would just move to US for a 3x salary and smaller income tax on it.
A New Approach of Determining a Temperature for a Single Particle with Mass
> imagine themselves some kind of super-patriots

They aren't this dumb. The valley is spooked. DeepSeek de-railed their biggest gravy train. Whores like Hawley et. al. do whatever they are paid to do. In this case, eliminate competition.
Giant study questions link between autism and maternal health
When Poland was in the Soviet bloc (post-WWII until 1989), there was the "Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Performances." Every censor working there was known by their full name, and you could even negotiate with them on certain issues when publishing a book, movie, etc. This was classic censorship but based on some old-fashioned rules.

Now, Big Tech can censor your work while providing only a vague explanation, with no clear feedback channel to protest or request more information. How would you call that?
so "sex sells" kind of ads are now illegal?
Microsoft 365 is dropping its free VPN feature for some subscribers
GDPR doesn't benefit anyone? Is that a joke?
I didn't even know it HAD that feature...
I'd prefer if Minority Report remains a work of fiction, or at least not possible in the EU.
Yes, not half of America supports the slide into facism. But I think some of those who supported trump need to publicly disavow this slide in order for opposition to be viable. Resistance to facism make a lot more sense if people believe a new, fair, election would actually help.
I'm astounded by how crap the ads on Youtube now are. Back when the Adcopalypse happened they stated they were going to clean up the ads shown, but now it's just AI generated crap.
They can. Buddhism doesn't deny gods existing. They just say they are subject to Dharma, same as everything.
You can even replace AI by humans. For example, it is not legal for e.g. police officers to engage in racial profiling.
> fully empty

Like that.
Helped by Mastodon having truly awful branding
Your comment appears to say "if you're not guaranteed a perfect, immediate, and lasting victory, then just don't bother."

This just reads as divisive, dismissive, or destructive.

Please note I'm not saying that you are those things, just that your comment reads like that.
This is what happens when the electorate gets lazy and lets politicians lie to them and then believe those lies also when those same voters become so angry and insulated to think they don’t need trade or immigrants.

So in the next day 25 years when I’ll be retiring … what’s going to be the next super power? I could very much see America falling behind to such a degree that it stops being the world reserve currency, Silicon Valley moves out, and some other nation rises to the top of the GDP charts. I’m hoping it’s not China but it may well be. I’m guessing / hoping it’s Europe though.
My experience was the same but I wanted to get rust news. In my opinion social networks are failed concept because they want you to have one account for everything. They should encourage people to have multiple accounts for different audience. It is normal to talk about different things with friends, colleagues, family etc.
s/Fun/Excruciatingly Tedious/
> If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

We are quickly moving into a world where most communications are at best assisted by AI and more often have little human input at all. There’s nothing inherently “wrong” about that (we all have opinions there), but “natural” (quotes to emphasize that they’re taught and not natural anyway) communication skills are going to be less and less common as time marches on, much like handwriting, typewriting, calligraphy, etc.
Drugs are more addictive than guns typically. I am not sure your comparison is useful.
LazyGit is one of my favorite pieces of software. I use it everyday, I love how seamlessly it fits into my work flow. The fact that it outputs all of its commands has helped me form a deeper understanding of git and what it’s doing under the hood. Not to mention it saves a TON of time.
I haven't seen anything remotely "extreme-left" on bluesky. I have seen swathes of racist, objectionable, far-right nonsense on X, though.
There’s no “prior” to the priors, thus the priors are actually posteriors, and follow from habit and not anything deductively necessary. Habit always evades critique, as it explains itself. Thus, we will be forced, ceaselessely, to think in the same ways, just with differing parameters.
I don't think so. There was never any suggestion that the original figure included acquiring hardware anyway.
Einstein spent almost all of his life in academia living off research grants. His miracle year took place at the end of his PhD and he was recruited as a full time professor just a few years later. Yes, he did science as a hobby until that point, but he very much wanted to do it full time and jumped at the chance when he got it.

Still, if you want scientific research to be done either as a hobby or a corporate job, that's A-OK. The incentives would be much better aligned. There would certainly be much less of it though, as many fields aren't amenable to hobbyist work at all (anything involving far away travel, full time work or that requires expensive equipment).
Also, onboarding.

Mastodon needs to be more streamlined.
Could you describe the scalability issue? Was it due to maintaining a bespoke execution engine in-house, the limits of RDBMS vertical scaling, other?
Please. Just don't.

Moving state into the global namespace and accessing it directly from that space makes it much more difficult to test, instrument and integrate.

Sure, if you're building disposable toy software, do whatever is easiest. But if you're building software for others to use, at least provide a context struct and pass that around when you can.

For those cases where this is challenging or impossible, please sequence your application or library initialization so that these globals are at least fungible/assignable at runtime.
If you want to boycott the US, I would say it's better to use Bluesky and make it a strong and viable competitor to X.
Except government systems for the same. In the Netherlands we had the benefits affaire. A system that attempted to predict people committing benefits crime. Destroying the lives of more than 25,000 people before anyone kicked in.

Do you think they are going to fine their own initiatives out of existence? I don't think so.

However, they also have a completely extrajudicial approach to fighting organised crime. Guaranteed to be using AI approaches on the banned list. But you won't have get any freedom of information request granted investigating anything like that.

For example, any kind of investigation would often involve knowing which person filled a particular role. They won't grant such requests, claiming it involves a person, so it's personally. They won't tell you.

Let's have a few more new laws to provide the citizens please, not government slapp handles.
Article 59 seems relevant, other two on a quick skim don't seem to relate to the subject.

> 2. For the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including safeguarding against and preventing threats to public security, under the control and responsibility of law enforcement authorities, the processing of personal data in AI regulatory sandboxes shall be based on a specific Union or national law and subject to the same cumulative conditions as referred to in paragraph 1.

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/59/

Seems like it allows pretty easily for national states to add in laws that allow them to skirt around
Yep. Some candidates really enjoy the question to the point where it becomes difficult to get them to stop answering it.
These laws will not be applied to the government
but they could have equally proved it by giving antibiotics to people with ulcers

it would be interesting if there was a body of evidence of people being cured of ulcers following antibiotics around the same time
there are still subcultures: the ones unpalatable to corporate interests; ones around topics that are illegal, very politically fringe, or centered on weird sex stuff
From the laws text:

For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply:

(1) ‘AI system’ means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments; Related: Recital 12

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/3/
https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/12/
So, it seems like yes, software, if it is non-deterministic enough would qualify. My impression is that software that simply takes "if your income is below this threshold, we deny you a credit card." Would be fine, but somewhere along the line when your decision tree grows large enough, it probably changes.
Link to actual legislation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689

> Chapters I and II shall apply from 2 February 2025;
Love this. So clearly written. The truest thing we know is how much we don’t know
Yep, they want to be able to continue to violate human rights and do the dirty.
What value does an external orchestrator add for managing complexity that an “embedded” solution could not?
Most Remote EV Charger
People uploading the Hollywood library do it like this:

Have channels with playlists and channels with 1 movie each. Add one of the playlists to the description (that playlist may not contain that movie)

The movies one by one vanish from the playlists and are uploaded again on new channels.

The playlist channels seem to last for a really long time.
Ahhh the free market. In which we make sure to protect OpenAI’s profits.
You're wrapping all the AI companies up in a single box, but:

* Most of the AI you get shoved down your throat is by the providers of services you use, not the AI companies.

* Among the AI companies, Anthropic in particular has had a very balanced voice that doesn't push for using AI where it doesn't belong. Their marketing page can barely be called that [0]. Their Claude-specific page doesn't mention using it for writing at all [1].

You seem to be committing the common fallacy of treating a large and disparate group of people and organizations as a monolith and ascribing cognitive dissonance where what you're actually seeing is diversity of opinion.

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/claude
Sure but that's true of startups in general.
> Maybe if the GDPR was a simple law

It is a simple law. You can read it in an afternoon. If you still don't understand it 8 years later, it's not the fault of the law.

> instead of 11 chapters and 99 sections

News flash: humans and their affairs are complicated

> all anyone got as a benefit from it is cookie banners

Please show me where GDPR requires cookie banners.

Bonus points: who is responsible for the cookie banners.

Double bonus points: why HN hails Apple for implementing "ask apps not to track", boos Facebook and others for invasive tracking, ... and boos GDPR which literally tells companies not to track users
Unfortunately yes, the article is a simplification, in part because the AI act delegates some regulation to existing other acts. So to know the full picture of AI regulation one needs to look at the combination of multiple texts.

The precise language on high risk is here [1], but some enumerations are placed in the annex, which (!!!) can be amended by the commission, if I am not completely mistaken. So this is very much a dynamic regulation.

[1] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/6/