skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's fair to argue that part of human intelligence is actually just a statistical matching. The best example which comes to mind is actually grammar. Grammar has a very complex set of rules, however most people cannot really name them or describe them accurately; instead, they just know whether or not a sentence _sounds_ correct. This feels a lot like the same statistical matching performed by LLMs. An individual's reasoning iterates in their mind what words follow each other, and what phrases are likely.

Outside of grammar, you can hear a lot of this when people talk; their sentences wander, and they don't always seem to know ahead of time where their sentences will end up. They start anchored to a thought, and seem to hope that the correct words end up falling into place.

Now, does all thought work like this? Definitely not, and more importantly, there are many other facets of thought which are not present in LLMs. When someone has wandered badly when trying to get a sentence out, they are often also able to introspect and see that they failed to articulate their thought. They can also slow down their speaking, or pause, and plan out ahead of time; in effect, using this same introspection to prevent themselves from speaking poorly in the first place. Of course there's also memory, consciousness, and all sorts of other facets of intelligence.

What I'm on the fence about is whether this point, or your point actually detracts from the author's argument.
Bingo. They admitted what everyone suspected: they are just scrapping BS from BS websites and spilling it back as something created by an "intelligent agent".
Where in the loss function of LLM training is the relationship between their model of reality and their predicted tokens? Any internal model an LLM has is an emergent property of their underlying training.

(And, given the way instruct/chat models are finetuned, I would say convincing/persuasive is very much the direction they are biased)
Link shouldn't point to a subtitle inside target page. Currently pointing at #whatsnew314-tail-call
As Rick Owens put it:

Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.
> Weird. Looking at my past several bills, my monthly usage is fairly constant; ~450kWh per month. So, (if my math is correct) that puts my annual usage at ~5400kWh.

That’s really quite a lot if you don’t have electric heating and cooling. It’d be worth trying to figure out where it’s going.
UWP and XBox don't do OpenGL, and they haven't touched ICD driver model in decades.

You only get OpenGL and Vulkan on Windows thanks to Intel, AMD and NVidia plugging their drivers into that ICD interface.
We encourage students to use their own machines. We even loan out old ThinkPads and MacBooks for students to run Linux on. Very few (3-5 per term) take us up on this offer. Most of our students would rather we do the sysadmin stuff for them.

The only requirement is that the code needs to run on our server, which they can easily check before submission.
Right - but as a consulting partner I take home that margin to spend on my boats, homes, and watches. What are universities getting? More university...
Wow! This is really cool. I love this idea and the implementation, great job!
This would interfere with my blocks of procrastination time.
As someone that seriously struggled with procrastination in school because I just could not find myself to care about many of the meaningless objectives I had to take.

Yeah, this. Having it on my calendar would likely have made it worse since than it turns into noise for the actual important things on my calendar.

If I used a tool like this I would have ended up missing so many important things like doctors appointments because I would have just ignored my calendar completely.

Also the idea of asking a system to find time to schedule this thing that gives me some joy in life sounds dystopian and screams messing up your mental health.
Love this idea! We wrote up a post about the book club we were running at our small company, and it was great for expanding people’s interest and understanding of different topics: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/05/running-a-company-boo...

Picking a book was often the hardest part though, so this tool having recommendations and voting seems like a really nice solution.
Living is serverless world.
We are destroying mutual understanding by hanging on to words†.

—

†) Please interpret my words literally and in your favor.
The idea that abstractions have to leak is a myth. We don't need fewer abstractions, just better ones. Abstractions that don't require obscuring the low-level details (e.g. typeclass/trait systems instead of interface/impl ones) help too.
> But How Do It Know? The Basic Principles Of Computers For Everyone

https://archive.org/details/jclarkscottbuthowdoitknowthebasi...
It depends. If you're selling the AI then yes, it will do better fact-checking than any human could do. However, if you're explaining to a client why your AI made up stuff that has costed someone thousands of dollars then no, it was always your employee's job to double check everything.
A botched mutilation? You don't say! The mystery: why don't people accept that fact, and what does this have to do with hacker news.
I think at best, there's a wide gulf between what LLMs can actually do, and what people _believe_ they can do. This is not to say that LLMs are not useful, but just that people broadly and regularly misunderstand their usefulness. This is not necessarily the fault of LLMs, but it does render their usage and adoption a bit problematic.
“Good enough for jazz” might be useful here?
This sounds like a good idea in a vacuum but the reality is that people (I consider myself a very organized person) will just not be able to follow their calendar as instructed as life doesn't work like that.

Instead of checking if their friend is available...they'll just message them and ask them what they are up to. It's a technical solution to a human nature problem which isn't always the best approach.
Huh, fair enough!! What's then funny in the context of this thread is that, while I am sure I knew that 20-25 years ago, it feels so wrong that it would support that -- and more like a "quirk" that it ever would -- that it surprises me (though it certainly doesn't shock me: most things have many quirks).
Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget
> imagined realities.

Imagined realities are a real part of reality.

> so LLMs are an approximation of an approximate model of reality?

Yes, and we as humans have a mental model that is just an approximation of reality. And we read books that are just an approximation of another human's approximation of reality. Does that mean that we are bullshit because we rely on approximations of approximations?

You're being way too pedantic and dismissive. Models are models, regardless of how limited and imperfect they are.
> want to light up only AFTER being connected to the WiFi

Do you isolate them at the switch? If you do, then it's less likely "connected to WiFi" and more likely that's the time to boot up the firmware.

If you don't, then they should always be up and connected to the wifi.

I've used Shelly lights with no issues, even pressing the button on a Zigbee switch to send a signal to Home Assistant who would in turn tell the Shelly to switch on was always instant.
You can only infer from what is remembered (regardless of whether the memory is accurate or not). The point here is, humans regularly have memories of their internal processes, whereas LLMs do not.

I don't see any difference between "a thought you had" and "a thought that was generated by your brain".
Funnily enough, this is sort of what the NVIDIA drivers do: they intercept game shaders and replace them by custom ones optimized by NVIDIA. Which is why you see stuff like this in NVIDIA drivers changelog: "optimized game X, runs 40% faster"
This got stalled needing the 64 bit support to be completed.

It worked pretty decently at the time.
A lot of the answers given by Gemini are just a verbatim copy of parts of web sites. I have seen this time after time when comparing the AI results and text that I find in the referenced web sites.
I would quite like my laptop to keep working, and half its drivers are rust…
I like it. A question and an idea:

Where do you get the goals from for the qualities etc at the bottom?

And I like the bar graphs of returns over the past x, y, z months/years. One suggestion is to list its biggest drops/gains or volatility
"The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

I think we understand the reasoning pretty well. Protectionism.

In the UK I don't think we have licensing required for hairdressers or egg sellers and we still have ok haircuts and eggs.
I’ve been a part of various book clubs in the past, mostly in person and few on Discord. One thing that really turned me off in virtual ones was how people would post while reading, sometimes creating small spoilers for others. I always wished for a way to mark spoilers to avoid ruining surprises. Is this something you’d consider adding?
When an ecosystem tries to go in the opposite direction, the mob shreds it to pieces, chanting, “Smart devs don’t use it,” “Only mid people like that,” and “The universe is memory unsafe, gotta rewrite.”

Then, PL creators whose language isn’t even at 1.0 light the fuse.
Why would you build this on a platform that 1) is mostly used for business communication and 2) requires a monthly per-user payment if you want to see content older than 90 days? Why not make it a standalone tool? Then you could always offer an optional Slack integration for those who wish to use it at work.
German Company Q.ANT Launches First Commercial Photonic Processor
I'm pretty sure they are from this collection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka:_The_Office_Writin...

(Also I believe these letters are 'anonymous' not in the sense that their authorship is unknown, but in that they were published under the institutional name of the Insurance Institute where he was employed, not under his personal name.)
I agree with your point, but DX12 went in the opposite direction of abstraction: it's a much lower level API than the highly abstracted OpenGL.
Chat, are Dutch people autistic?
>being blindsided when it, inevitably, becomes mainstream.

I don't see how this could happen. This is not a limited resource. It's not a real estate opportunity. There is enough AI for everyone to buy when it becomes useful to do so.

I think FOMO correctly identifies the irrational effort of many companies to jump in without any idea of what the utility might be in any practical sense.
“ A cell router is responsible for detecting failure within a cell (Zombie outbreak) and rerouting requests (Citizens) to other neighborhoods.”

Misleading. The difference between a pure horizontally-scaled cluster and cell-based architecture is that traffic destined for a compromised cell does not get routed to a healthy cell. Fault isolation (preventing noisy neighbors and poison pills from spilling over to progressively more cells) is a primary tenet of cell-based architecture.
And lack of one more competitor.
Sounds like Google's AI produced some stats that were quite obviously mistaken, but nobody cared to fact-check in the slightest before shipping.

> the Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” [...] but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes.

What's this guy is describing is pretty much the root cause of what we colloquially refer to as "hallucination".
Summary: a story of software engineer as fruit ranked in a non descript software company, doing non-descript work. ( probably “software” )

I struggle to see any arguments.

And I agree with the general feeling. But beside cute image of fruits and some funny graphic, nothing is backing that opinion.
File name extensions aren’t an inherent or necessary part of the desktop metaphor. They can be stored as metadata in the file system. Mac OS used to do this.
Has anyone here successfully (or not) implemented BPMN for this kind of process management?
>Can you be more clear?

How many times has ikey pulled this now? It's no longer a surprise at this point.
Why not include some suggested tools in your comment? "you are an idiot for using ChatGPT" (paraphrased) isn't very helpful.
I don't see why any of those are negative qualities.
If a model often produces information that is blatantly wrong, then you need to check ALL of its outputs. If you're going to have to double-check all information that it provides, you might as well skip using it entirely and search for the information directly.
I'm sure this will come in handy for me at some point. I've led a team through moving parts of their terraform/aws monolith to cells. Some people are able to grasp what cell-based architecture is and when it's useful pretty easily, but for a few it just doesn't click.
Automating the Vim Workplace (2020)
Very much this. For some reason people assume that security/exploits are what the below is refering to, as if that's the endgoal that software is trying to solve.

> it's not clear if memory safety is the largest source of problems building software today
If I do a google search I can inspect the source of a response for trustworthiness and I can inspect several other sources that also appear in the results for agreement.

With an AI query I get one response back and although people are trying to teach their AI tools to cite sources, this is not universal.
Mullenweg silences major WP contributor over personal grievance
It is, and they give them special phones for that reason. Obama had a special Blackberry limited to 10 people.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/05/barack-ob...
University digital media dynamics of brand visibility in the attention economy
> correlates with age

Definitely a "citation needed" moment I think. Friday, I was with a
lot of 12 year olds all firmly of the opinion that it's a "way to get
intelligence/information" but it's not actually intelligent. (FWIW
in UK they say "for real life intelligent") I noted this distinction.
Or rather, I noted because that's what they're taught. So teachers,
naturally pass on the commonsense position that "it's still just a
computer". That means waiting for funerals will not settle the matter
either. That's not to say a significant sect of more credulous "AI
worshippers" will not emerge.
Oh my god, if my manager asked me to waste my time on such trivialities - or even worse, calling team meetings to “discuss” them so that we can now collectively waste our time, I would quit the next moment. During my exit interview I would state that my manager was an imbecile, incompetent and the reason I am leaving.
I'm sure TFA's conclusion is right; but its argument would be strengthened by providing the codegen for both versions, instead of just the better version. Quote:

"The second wrong thing with the supposedly optimizer [sic] version is that it actually runs much slower than the original version [...] wasting two multiplications and one or two additions. [...] But don't take my word for it, let's look at the generated machine code for the relevant part of the shader"

—then proceeds to show only one codegen: the one containing no multiplications or additions. That proves the good version is fine; it doesn't yet prove the bad version is worse.
What about information? We know that it is conserved, so what is the corresponding symmetry?
I think a private pilot license is probably of comparable or greater difficulty than being a barber. I have a PPL and have done my own barbering and flying is both trickier and has worse consequences if you screw up. I agree a PPL isn't close to enough to fly an airliner. But shaving and trimming hair?
I've never quite understood enough about types to know why, but: it's more like the difference between read-only and write-only.

One of the variances is safe if you only read, and one is safe if you only write.
GameStop Trolls Customers for Picking Digital During PSN Outage on PS5, PS4
It is weird how long misinformation like this sticks around, the conditional move/select approach has been superior for decades on both CPU & GPU, but somehow some people still write the other approach as an "optimization".
I didn't explain my point there, let me try with the automobile example.

There's a key difference in the how the impact of the automobile happened - consumers got to choose to buy them and the impact was driven in large part by market demand.

The fact that LLMs are going to have a big impact seems obvious because a comparatively few number of people are making a huge deal out of them, both with attention and money. LLMs will be big but that says nothing of their usefulness or even consumer demand, it says more about how the industry is being financed.
Indeed. That's a gross understatement even.

And I'd argue that former nerds turn into predatory CEOs just fine, given enough time and money, too.
All that's academic now we have power supplies that are capable of handling both frequencies and the various voltages in use across the globe.
Baffled by generational garbage collection – wingolog
It can be a good idea to count and record these safety net activations for reporting purposes. If you do so, the discussion of e.g. "Why do we run replicas for our databases" becomes a very simple discussion: It has simplified us maintenance X times this year (by avoiding downtime to to switch overs), and it has avoided Y outages (again due to automated switch overs) - recovery of the databases after the outage took Z hours, which would have been downtime. Suddenly you've moved the vague "We need it for safety and availability reasons" into concrete admin-hours and downtime-minutes.

Or, "Can't we skip all these tests/other long-running quality process?"
I think it's true that these systems already have capabilities that could result in a loss of human control.

Whether the systems are "smart" enough to take that a step further, i.e., survive at all costs, seems unlikely. But I can't imagine that that's far away at this point.

One thing that stood out to me here was the shutdown avoidance. Author's state that these models (Qwen more so), were able to intercept SIGKILL and successfully self-replicate to another device.
For me, procrastination was purely an optimization. Trying to “solve” it would have made things worse.

One of the proudest accomplishments through all of high school, university, and grad school was getting almost precisely the minimum grades required to accomplish my goals. It maximized time I had to apply to my social and physical health/skills. And in the professional world, I have been convinced they’re considerably more important.
Profit creaming, not good for county even if it seems good in the city.

Everytime there is a natural disaster in the US the press report xxxx houses without power.
US leccy firms pride the bear minimum service, always. Profit comes first. Delivery second priority at best.

This doesn't ofter happen in Europe because they dont profit cream and builds reliable redundant grid for almost everone.
The grid even extends beyond countries boundaries, with neighbouring countries supporting each other.

Some folk out in the sticks, who you might think don't matter, provide useful services to the city folk. Eg farmers.

I.e. Cost the grid not the city.

You probably are being ripped off in the US, but that's a different story to the one being told imho.

Careful what you wish for.
This is famously how Maryam Mirzakhani worked as well. Huge thick A2 sheets where she doodled and did computations; she said she disliked the cramped style of normal notebooks.
Update, I found that AiStudios changelog gives an explanation of where each model is best fit.

Gemini 2.0 Flash is just Googles production ready model

Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite Preview is their smallest model for high volume tasks

Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental is the strongest Gemini model

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental (gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-1219 explicitly shows its thoughts

https://aistudio.google.com/app/changelog#february-5th-2025

https://aistudio.google.com/app/changelog#december-19-2024
Fascinating how some road paths have endured the centuries.
There is a certain amount of "convergence" of good practices thats happening despite the exhausting trend following. E.g. people happily(?) wrote c++ code for decades but today there is strong pressure from the success of ecosystems like rust and python. Open source accelerates that competitive evolution as it improves transparency and lowers the threshold for adoption.
In the United States it is illegal to identify yourself as a police officer when you are not, and there are clear consequences for violating such laws. Professional titles either carry some sort of significance or they don't. The very clear consequence of titles/labels that aren't valid is fraud and there are very many laws in the US about this for a variety of venues.

It seems the only reason for a person to identify themself as some sort of engineer when they are not is fraud. What other would a person have to misrepresent themself?
A real branch is useful if you can realistically skip a bunch of work, but this requires all the lanes to agree, on a GPU that means 32 to 64 lanes need to all agree, also for something basic like a few arithmetic ops there is no point.
what's medium size? how many files (lines)? what's the limit for Windsurf?
Thanks a bunch for the suggestion! I’ve run into the same issue in online book clubs, so it's something that I'll definitely add in the upcoming version!
A Gaming PC That Can Fly [video]
This test had to run shell commands to literally copy its code and run itself in a separate process.

Although I agree they need to replicate themselves on a different machine. But these are also just shell commands, all it needs access to is a cloud cli/api tool with an active payment method and it can do the same replication
> Just to find how to do anything in Python I need to look at sites like stackoverflow

Huh? Surely you don’t expect docs to answer generic questions like, “how do I flatten a nested list?”

Pandas (and Polars!) is an excellent library that serves specific needs. One of those is not doing basic file parsing. I’ve seen comments advocating its usage for tasks as simple as “read a CSV file in and get the Nth column.” The same goes for NumPy – powerful library that’s ridiculously over-used for things that are trivially solvable by stdlib.
I actually have a project that I need to start that I’m really looking forward to because it will a new area of programming for me, but I’m procrastinating because I know that once I start it will be all-consuming and I’ll have no time for anything else.
ctrl+b
looks like nobody asked

if you wish for GP to do that, ask them to do that
This will need refactoring before being enabled, and possibly might not be enabled at all because it would introduce a perf regression do to the necessary checks to branch between moveBefore or insertBefore.

This was brought up multiple times to the html spec authors, but no changes were made.
> The local commercial, which advertises how people can use “AI for every business”, showcases Gemini’s abilities by depicting the tool helping a cheesemonger in Wisconsin to write a product description

By copy/pasting another Cheese monger's incorrect product description...
Reminds me of User Mode Linux, which AFAIK, runs only on Linux, maybe *nix.
Why do MAGA conservatives cheer the over-turning of Chevron, dramatically limiting the executive branch's power to interpret law, while also simultaneously cheering Trump's initiative to seize Congress's power of the purse?

What's the internal logic that rationalizes executive regulatory power being unconstitutional with a legal presidential power to unilaterally ignore Congress's funding allocations?
Ngl, I did not pick up on that, and was confused. Still, I assumed good intent and left it alone.