skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(OP here) That's a good point---these mereologies tend to grow very fast with system size. Exponential is not even so bad. There is the 'redundancy' mereology for example, which scales with the Dedekind numbers. This appears quite often in information theory and neuroscience, but quickly becomes intractable.

As I see it, emergence comes in two flavours: a higher-order interaction among microscopic parts is already emergent in the sense that it is a non-atomic thing that determines the behaviour of atoms (I use atoms to refer to the 'singletons' or smallest elements of the theory, not necessarily physical atoms). But you're completely right in saying that there is another sense of emergence which only really happens for a 'thermodynamic' number of atoms. The difference seems somehow captured by the contrast between:

-- the whole is more than the sum of the parts
-- the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Both are commonly called emergence! If it turns out that you don't need to keep track of all birds in a flock to describe its behaviour, then we call that emergent because the whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts.

Your example of genetics is interesting, because it is actually what got me interested in this problem in the first place. I spent most of my PhD struggling with calculating up to 7-point interactions among genes, and you indeed need some clever tricks to make this tractable. I used causal discovery methods to rule out most potential interactions based on conditional dependencies. This is now a piece of open-source software: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44320-024-00074-...
Another day, another Safari Paging issue, another 1TB written to my SSD.
Relevant:

TIL that ATMs are robbed with explosives. Criminals fill machines with propane or acetylene then ignite the gas, or use external bombs. Germany (where 60% of attacks succeed) is Europe's #1 target; landlords don't like to lease to banks with ATMs, because blowing them up endangers other tenants.
<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1im37e4/til_t...>
If I want to run a software written by someone, going to that someone's site and grabbing the source and/or binary straight from them seems like a pretty straight-forward decision, you don't need some middle man of a "distribution maintainer".

Besides, while I appreciate the efforts of the distro package maintainers, they are overworked and can't really give the amount of care this huge pile of software in the repository needs, not to mention that sometimes their efforts are counterproductive (IIRC Debian used to deliberately break some terminfo(5) records to work around problems in some other packages). And I definitely remember reading an article (though I can't for the love of me to find it) about a Linux distro doing an automated switch from some sort of RPM-like packaging to straight-up using Flatpak, with predictably horrible results of lots and lots of broken software.
> Why are the top digital safety institutions hiring the very bottom of the barrel?

I don't know anything about "The Com" or top digital safety institutions.

But I do know that historically, some parts of hacker culture have drawn heavily from political theories of anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, and libertarianism.

If the authorities and rules intend that I not have access to something, and I have a fascination with bypassing that and getting access anyway, am I not subverting power structures in the most literal sense?

If large corporations believe they alone should control the software that runs on my printer, so that they can ensure only authentic supplies are used and premium features are only available on premium devices, while I believe every user should be able to modify their printer's software and behaviour without limit, including to bypass such restrictions - is this not an anarchist stance, opposing coercion and mechanisms that perpetuate control?

If the exploit-discovering side of cybersecurity is inherently anti-authority, recruiting people who've never defied an authority in their life might not be the best move.
'I built a tool' no you didn't, you wrote a program. Stop larping
We have been dropping artillery shells relatively accurately using classical mechanics for a couple of decades now.
“Too fuckin bad”
I'm sure the dude that lost it, knows his addresses and can tell if his coins have moved or not. Otherwise, he probably wouldn't be still looking to recover it.
Such a strange take on this.
Yes, I was aware of the toggle switch ambiguity when describing a button... (not a perfect analogy anyway)
2 * deepseek-v3
He didn’t find it tho?

Unless you mean that is what will happen.
Press left arrow four time and type “6”.
Links:

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/09/archives/notes-on-people-...:

A reporter on assignment for the weekly National Enquirer who had an extraordinary interest in Secretary of State Kissinger's trash was questioned for two‐and‐a‐half hours by Secret Servicemen and Washington policemen Monday night after he picked up five bags of the Kissinger garbage.

“Jay Gourley, a 37‐year‐old Washington‐based reporter, was allowed to keep the Kissinger refuse after he argued, successfully, that it was property abandoned on public land, according to an Enquirer spokesmen.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/21/archives/paper-says-kissi...:

“In an article published in this week's editions, the newspaper said documents retrieved by Mr. Gourley included the following:

¶Detailed work schedules for the agents on duty at Mr. Kissinger's home and the names of most of the agents assigned to him.

¶A memorandum that revealed that the Secret Service was testing a new code light signal system for all its limousines.
¶A handwritten note on the back of an activity report that gave the number and type of arms and ammunition carried in each Secret Service limousine.

¶A handwritten note presumably written by an agent indicating that a shotgun had been left behind on Mr. Kissinger's trip to the Virgin Islands last month.”

https://www.gettyimages.ca/search/2/image?family=editorial&p...: photos of him returning the garbage.
https://marginalia-search.com/ is worth a try
Sporting tournaments and changed birth rates 9 months later
This is why my go-to estimate for many things where the result is outlandishly large is "at least six".
I wonder if Martin Luther would have a reason to slander the head figure of catholicism and creator of the doctrine used by Cajetan to argue against his own doctrine... The same Luther who was proven by his own disciples to have exaggerated many stories about catholics in his biography.
Great, I landed on the reasoning and citations bit through trial and error and the outputs improved for sure.
I faintly remember when the kernel config asked you if you wanted both `a.out` and `ELF` support.

No one says that single binaries compiled in the last 10 years might be usable without a VM in another 10 or 20 years.

And no, 20 years for the same blog to exist isn't even so rare.
That exactly what I was going to say: what makes him think that a HDD bought in 2013 and buried in a landfill site since then will work when its plugged in?

Personally I have my doubts - as per Nursie: It's gone mate.
> you need more than the model itself and a way to run it. You also need the data and the program that can be used to train it.

the model reveals the architecture which is all you need to use/run/train it.
>You catch a guy doing something bad

If you have evidence that he was doing something bad, prosecute him. You must have evidence, because you couldn’t know he was doing something bad based off these chats you can’t read.

>You know he's a part of a big organized crime organisation, because you already caught some of the other conspirators.

So charge them with conspiracy or RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).

>you could bring the whole thing down based on documents / chats etc which are encrypted.

How can you possibly know that? If you have evidence of crimes, use that to prosecute. If you don’t have evidence, then you don’t know crimes were committed. Regardless, you don’t even know if these encrypted chats contain anything incriminating.

Government is not another mafia, they are a group of people who are flawed. “Good” governments have laws protecting the rights of citizens against individuals within government. That is like saying that we don’t need defense attorneys because prosecutors are good people and wouldn’t bring a case against an innocent person, or would never bend/break the rules to get a conviction. We have them to protect the rights of the innocent and the guilty.
This.

After my Nissan car started to have transmission problems that would cost thousands of dollars to fix (among various other small issues), I sold it as quickly as possibly and swore I'll touch the make again.
I totally agree and disagree. Yes it’s their culture but it’s not unfair at all.

Its the only big tech company that sells privacy to consumers. They could do that because unlike the competition they weren’t an ad company and thus didn’t need to spy. (This is changing and no longer true, but that’s a different story).

This competitive advantage goes away if nobody can sell privacy because it’s illegal. A publicly traded corporation does not exit a large market because one of their products is banned, much less because of principles. Apple will comply just as they’ve done before, and while maintaining the blast radius to only introducing the backdoor on UK residents.
Try buckling all your back seat belts. Recently US cars are required to annoy you if back seat passengers are not buckled in; many (most?) manufacturers are not putting in weight sensors to see if there are rear seat passengers present; they’re just putting in seat belt buckled sensors.
Things not moving as fast as he wants isn't the same as having exhausted all other avenues.
- to structure your thoughts

- document them for a future you

- learn to better do technical communication with people which might not be experts on the specific topic (through without feedback this is just so so)

- sometimes to give HR more insight into your skills

which reminds me I wanted to setup a blog for a long while, I originally wanted to have some "fun" with setup, theming etc. but I think I just should start with some default template until I have time to have "fun" with the setup. Then I would at least already write something....
Training a model to reason that it should write and execute code is the solution here. Synthetic datasets showing lots of math questions followed by reasoning that writes and executes the program for the answer.
Good point.

That'd mean they could still blackmail or otherwise ransom it to him though.

ie "Give us $xxx or you'll never see the hdd" type of thing
Taking a different tack from others in this thread. I don't think you can say that a TI-83 is not reasoning if it is doing calculations. Certainly it is not aware of any concepts of numbers and has no meaningful sense of the operation, but those are attributes of sentience, not reasoning. The reasoning ability of a calculator is extremely limited but what make those capabilities that it does have, non reasoning.

What non-sentience based property do you think something should have to be considered reasoning. Do you consider sentience and reasoning to be one and the same? If not then you should be able to indicate what distinguishes one from the other.

I doubt anyone here is arguing that chatGPT is sentient, yet plenty accept that it can reason to some extent.
what do you refer to by "other models" not belonging to the "SOTA ones"?
As of September, Vance has indeed publicly cited Yarvin:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/13/jd-vance-n...
Humans didn’t originate there, so unlikely.
You were asked for YOUR OPINION about the defensibility of cuts to PEPFAR, USAID, and the extension of massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Am I to interpret your “well go win the election!” to mean that you (personally) approve of said decisions and their relative priority?

It seems odd you can’t just state that, and instead deflect to a totally different topic of how people win power (which, of course, we all know).
extremely misleading headline implies that it just happened.
At which point does this move from obsession to mental illness?
Thread-Safe Memory Copy
Very true. If you include FastMM in your project use-after-free is trapped along with other memory errors.

I find the allocate / try / finally / free paradigm in Delphi makes things easier, it just becomes a habit.

eg

var obj := TMyObject.Create

try

...do stuff

finally

obj.free //(or for bonus points freeandnil(obj))

end;
Hyundai manufacturing quality has improved over time.
Programming Without Friction
He's a honeypot for people with more money than sense. Not bad work if you can get it.
I've enjoyed playing with WikiTok recently. The only thing I don't like is that it opens wikipedia in a separate page when you want to read more, and it disrupts my engagement flow. I'd like to see a version where the content is implemented directly into the app.
How do archeologists solve the survivor bias of the "Out of Africa" theory?

After all, if humans were randomly distributed on planet Earth according to the local environment's carrying capacity, 100 000 years later Id expect to find a lot more human remains in Eritrea than the Pontine marshes.
Traveling to Japan for three months because life's too short
Advertising Is a Cancer on Society (2019)
If I had to guess, Bender from Futurama.
> but I own a Tesla and I have the opposite experience. Everything worked out of the box.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: should we give Tesla a cookie? "Everything worked out of the box" is what's supposed to happen.
You can expect professionals to not act like trained monkeys.
Money is only trusted if everyone agrees that "a number in a ledger" is money.

Ultimately, wealth, beyond what you physically control, is only real if everyone else agrees that it's real. Otherwise you're just tapping a rock on another rock and walking out of the store with eggs.

And that 36 trillion in debt was created with a complex dance out in the open; I've got some paper who wants some paper I'll give you number go up in a year if you give me number now! And we can all look at the ledger and there are people in robes in a locked room who protect the ledger when we're not looking.

If instead we've got a ledger, left floating around the house and garage, and all the people in robes have been fired, and all of a sudden we don't need that tedious "pass laws" stuff to "balance the budget" and the ledger's full of sharpie scribblings, what are the numbers in that ledger? The fewer people who believe that number or ledger, the fewer eggs you'll be able to buy by tapping your rock on someone else's rock.

The same goes for other ledgers -- stocks -- the US stock market is trusted only because people trust the numbers that are reported. If you've fired all the regulators, auditors, and enforcers, your stock market will lose trust, and again, the numbers will be the same but worth less because nobody will believe anything.
NESFab – A new programming language for creating NES games
I wouldn't agree to call any of that a developer, adding junior to the term doesn't move the needle.

I wouldn't call a calculator a mini accountant. These things can operate much faster than an army of mathematicians but they remain tools. Of course l, tools humans can leverage. Productivity gains are phenomenal.

Perhaps my input to the topic wasn't clear. I use LLMs. I use LLMs in the context of software engineering. I don't treat them as my peers. I don't dream of a future where this tech can solve more than its often misunderstood scope.

We are letting ourselves be confused by those who do have an interest in, or can't do better than, up selling.

Engineers are already having to deal with very difficult to reconcile side effects. Maybe you aren't seeing it yet, or your comment would have at least recognized and touched on those.
The challenge is getting software engineers to learn and use UML properly. As a discipline, we seem to be in a perpetual state of reinventing the wheel, when we have plenty of mature tools and established best practices that people don't care to learn.
Good for who? External parties that want to force their vision of what the project should be?
> Second: when you buy a car, do you ask yourself, how will I fix it in case anything goes wrong? Buying a car in a country where there's no service is a huge no-no.

From middle of Slovakia to Budapest, Hungary is as far as Houston to Austin drive. No border or customs controls. Vehicle insurance issued in one, is valid in both. You only have to spend few euros to buy a vignette (road toll). I don't see your point.
Andrej's video is great but the explanation on the RL part is a bit vague to me. How exactly do we train on the right answers? Do we collect the reasoning traces and train on them like supervised learning or do we compute some scores and use them as a loss function ? Isn't the reward then very sparse? What if LLMs can't generate any right answers cause the problems are too hard?

Also how can the training of LLMs be parallelized when updating parameters are sequential? Sure we can train on several samples simultaneously, but the parameter updates are with respect to the first step.
GitHub Copilot Goes Agentic
I still believe in blogging. For anyone keen on getting started or switch providers, I recenly launched a no-nonsense service: https://LMNO.lol. The experience feels more like taking notes than blogging (low friction).

My blog is https://lmno.lol/alvaro (also at https://xenodium.com)
LLMs are bad at counting because nobody counts in text, we count in our heads which is not in the training material.
After the 'metaverse' stuff flopped, desperate to spend their money on some other thing that might be The Future(TM)?

Arguably this would be kind of rational behaviour for them even if they thought that LLM stuff had a low chance of being the next thing; they have lots and lots of money, and lots of revenue, so one strategy would be just to latch on to every new fad, and then if one is a real thing they don't get left behind (and if it's not, well, they can afford it).

My suspicion is that this is where most Big Tech interest in LLMs comes from; it's essentially risk management.
yandex but even their results are starting to be useless and dumb.
I have tried many times to start a blog. I usually manage to eek out one or two articles before getting utterly stuck.

I have lots of things I want to write about but I feel completely anxious about putting my ideas out there, even got relatively simple, straightforward things.

How do you push through the anxiety and actually put things out there?
Surface area. Networking. Openness to those that for whatever reason click and might become friends, business associates and romantic partners. Few will click, but those few will have shown at least some interest in you and what you do. It took divorce and loneliness for me to understand the concept of surface area, to exist, to not be invisible and anonymous, but create tiny opportunities for connection. It's pretty much all we can do as busy adults.
> Pure functions are best of course, but you can't build real-world things entirely from pure functions.

That's just plain wrong. There's even a language built entirely around pure functions: Haskell.
> But generally speaking the Linux support experience is decidedly worse than *BSD or any proprietary OS.

Going to have to disagree on that one.
I was an Apple ][ (well, Franklin Ace, technically) guy back in the day, but my high school used mostly C64s. The slow speed of Commodore floppies infuriated me. And they even had their own CPU inside the drive! By all rights, they should have been faster than Apple drives which were run by the computer's CPU.
My last car in the states was a 1999 chevy prizm, manual transmission. Such a cheap and fun car, though I can't say it was particularly reliable. Still got $500 for it at CarMax, even though the A/C wasn't working and it had a ton of miles on it.
After doing the "weird gesture", rather than apologising for doing something that many people interpreted as a nazi gesture, he made a load of crappy puns about it involving the names of various high-ranking nazi leaders
It must be some really silly thing like windshield heater stuck "on".
"It's almost like I am good with money" twitted Musk sharing a link for an article citing the 97 cents on the dollar sell out.

It's incredible that Twitter is still worse than it was before the sale on almost any metric you can think of, but because he purchased his way into the government the market just bails him out on the chance they might get on his good graces.

It's just like Trump getting all that DB money. If you're rich and powerful enough you can indeed win over the house and take on the banks. I wonder how much is just the banks counting on this being a way to pay for influence and not really loans worth giving.
"common denominator" is the thing that is guaranteed common for all commands.

man(1) is, provided that people produce man pages. It's also orthogonal and composable without interference: one can write a man page for commands that don't have man pages.

Flags are not, because commands parse their arguments in whatever way; all commands can accept arguments but arguments are also part of the operational interface contract. man(1) is decoupling all possible problems out.

It is also extremely obvious than `man foo` is side-effect free, whereas `foo whatever`, whether `whatever` can be `--help` or anything else, has unknown effects when the command is unknown.

Some argue that man pages are too rich; well the man pages can just also start with a summary identical to what a hypothetical `--help` flag would output.

Turns out this is the conventional `SYNOPSYS` title of section 1 man pages, and possibly the `OPTIONS` one; if these are absent or badly written then one could reasonably posit that a hypothetical `--help` flag output would be just as unhelpful; cue the wads of commands that "--helpfully" output `foo [-4236xXksirtTgsdv]` as help, which tells you nothing really helpful.

`info(1)` can burn in hell though.
Its a 3d animation, no real robots here.
> the world's best selling car two years in a row

cite?
Honestly it seems to me like a shock and awe PR campaign combien md with a daily grind. It’s been like 15 days, what thoughtful work do you think it’s being announced that happens that fast from a cold start (including hiring!)
Yeah. I'm all for kids hacking, and even hackers with criminal records getting a second chance at security firm. Hacking is done for a lot of reasons, it could be just an interest in solving puzzles, and they happened to get in trouble with the law.

The part I'm not digging, is they seem a bit young to be taking over the Treasury Dept, or any department. It seems like this would have been better done by an Accounting Audit Firm, not hackers.

Hackers are just trying to get in, get data. An accounting audit would be more about finding impropriety.

So, it seems on the surface like 'finding waste' is not the goal.
A bit over a dozen years ago had drinks with a recruiter at a cafe not far from T Square.

Walking her back to the subway station she laughed and confided.

"Everything in China is fake!"
Durable plastic gets a sustainability makeover in novel polymerization process