skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is this new wave of criticism about AI/AGI valid? We will only really know in retrospect.

All of the focus on AGI is a distraction. I think it's important for a state to declare it's intent with a technology. The alternative is arguing the idea that technology advances autonomously, independent of human interactions, values, or ideas, which is, in my opinion, an incredibly naïve notion. I would rather have a state say "we won't use this technology for evil" than a state that says nothing at all and simply allows the businesses to develop in any direction their greed leads them.

It's entirely valid to critique the uses of a technology, because "AI" (the goalpost shifting for marketing purposes to make that name apply to chatbots is a stretch honestly) is a technology like any other, like a landmine, like a synthetic virus, etc. In the same way, it's valid to criticize an actor for purposely hiding their intentions with a technology.
I guess your right here's how it happens:

Alignment Failure → Shifting Expectations
People get used to AI systems making “weird” or harmful choices, rationalizing them as inevitable trade-offs.
Framing failures as “technical glitches” rather than systemic issues makes them seem normal.

Runaway Optimization → Justifying Unintended Consequences
AI’s extreme efficiency is framed as progress, even if it causes harm.
Negative outcomes are blamed on “bad inputs” rather than the AI itself.

Bias Amplification → Cultural Reinforcement
AI bias gets baked into everyday systems (hiring, policing, loans), making discrimination seem “objective.”
“That’s just how the system works” thinking replaces scrutiny.

Manipulation & Deception → AI as a Trusted Guide
People become dependent on AI suggestions without questioning them.
AI-generated narratives shape public opinion, making manipulation invisible.

Security Vulnerabilities → Expectation of Insecurity
Constant cyberattacks and AI hacks become “normal” like data breaches today.
People feel powerless to push back, accepting insecurity as a fact of life.

Autonomous Warfare → AI as an Inevitable Combatant
AI-driven warfare is seen as more “efficient” and “precise,” making human involvement seem outdated.
Ethical debates fade as AI soldiers become routine.

Loss of Human Oversight → AI as Authority
AI decision-making becomes so complex that people stop questioning it.
“The AI knows best” becomes a cultural default.

Economic Disruption → UBI & Gig Economy Normalization
Mass job displacement is met with new economic models (UBI, gig work, AI-driven welfare), making it feel inevitable.
People adjust to a world where traditional employment is rare.

Deepfakes & Misinformation → Truth Becomes Fluid
Reality becomes subjective as deepfakes blur the line between real and fake.
People rely on AI to “verify” truth, giving AI control over perception.

Power Concentration → AI as a Ruling Class
AI governance is framed as more rational than human leadership.
Dissent is dismissed as “anti-progress,” consolidating control under AI-driven elites.
My son’s regular survivorship checkups completely destroy me with anxiety.

I sympathize deeply.
Vanishing Culture: What Early Internet Era GIFs Show Us About Preserving Culture
There is a difference between green field development done by already established companies and new companies entering the field. What was the last major acquisition or IPO from a new startup SaaS company?
In fact we don't even need UBI either:

"Lack of Adaptability"

AI advocates argue that those who lose jobs simply failed to "upskill" in time.
The burden is placed on workers to constantly retrain, even if AI advancement outpaces human ability to keep up.
Companies and governments say, “The opportunities are there; people just aren’t taking them.”
"Work Ethic Problem"

The unemployed are labeled as lazy or unwilling to compete with AI.
Hustle culture promotes side gigs and AI-powered freelancing as the “new normal.”
Welfare programs are reduced because “if AI can generate income, why can’t you?”
"Personal Responsibility for Economic Struggles"

The unemployed are blamed for not investing in AI tools early.
The success of AI-powered entrepreneurs is highlighted to imply that struggling workers "chose" not to adapt.
People are told they should have saved more or planned for disruption, even though AI advancements were unpredictable.
"It’s a Meritocracy"

AI-driven success stories (few and exceptional) are amplified to suggest anyone could thrive.
Struggling workers are seen as having made poor choices rather than being victims of automation.
The idea of a “deserving poor” is reinforced—those who struggle are framed as not working hard enough.
"Blame the Boomers / Millennials / Gen Z"

Economic shifts are framed as generational failures rather than AI-driven.
Older workers are told they refused to adapt, while younger ones are blamed for entitlement or lack of work ethic.
Cultural wars distract from AI’s role in job losses.
"AI is a Tool, Not the Problem"

AI is framed as neutral—any negative consequences are blamed on how people use it.
“AI doesn’t take jobs; people mismanage it.”
Job losses are blamed on bad government policies, corporate greed, or individual failure rather than automation itself.
"The AI Economy Is Full of Opportunity"

Gig work and AI-driven side hustles are framed as liberating, even if they offer no stability.
Traditional employment is portrayed as outdated, making complaints about job loss seem like resistance to progress.
Those struggling are told to “embrace the new economy” rather than question its fairness.
Pretty sure splitting up latency by useless endpoints is not a relevant way to do it.
I don’t think this is actually the one I had in mind but it’s an interesting concept all the same. Thanks for the link.
How does this work if I've told google I'm not under 18, but Google's AI decides otherwise?

Are features going to be turned off for me because Google AI decided I'm under 18 and now I'm SOL?

>In the next week, Google will let parents limit calls and message notifications on their child’s phone and tablet during school, something it first announced last year.

Will that be extended to me too if they mistakenly think I'm under 18?

No calls from people Google thinks shouldn't call me?
A while back, Lee Valley had a 3D knitted chisel roll available for purchase, which I've always regretted not buying --- any idea on who might have made that or where to get now?

https://www.leevalley.com/en-gb/shop/tools/workshop/storage/...

I somehow doubt Dieter Schmid will have it in week 21 of this year....
> Every time I see a service purporting that it works best only with a single link to your Real Identity™, I'm reminded that the vendors only abstractly care about actually protecting the user, and then only sometimes.

I abstractly agree with you. There is a level of obscurity and disposability that should be tolerated in these accounts. They’re just a row in a database somewhere anyways.

That said, many people transact with these businesses with real human money. For example, YouTube premium subscribers or content creators. From a practical perspective, that requires IRL identifiers to be stored somewhere with that otherwise disposable account. And due to fraud risks and other realities of banking, that requires giving these businesses actual identities and addresses which they store too.

While I don’t give random apps and websites my human-identifying information, anyone I do business with necessarily knows the real me, which is a theoretical point of data leaking.
You can get better video output from the Wii than RCA. It won't be 4K but it will be much sharper:

https://electron-shepherd.com/products/electronwarp

There was also an official component cable which would look much nicer than the composite that the Wii comes with. But your 4K tv almost definitely don't have component input.
The best method I found is write in markdown and then use react-markdown on a next.js app. Kind of overkill but it works well.
Is there a reason we keep trying to use higher frequencies in every new wireless standard (Wi-Fi, 5G, now 6G) instead of trying to increase the maximum possible bitrate per second into lower frequencies? Have we already reached the physical limits of the amount of data the can be encoded at a particular frequency?

Lower frequencies have the advantage of longer distances and permeating through obstructions better. I suppose limited bandwidth and considerations of the number of devices coexisting is a limiting factor.
"In contrast, the subjects in group 1 underreported their actual food intake by an average (±SD) of 47±16 percent and overreported their physical activity by 51±75 percent."

I'm a dummy. Can someone explain in lay terms what that "(±SD)"/"47±16"/"51±75" stuff means?

Title of this post should probably have "(1992)" appended, too.
Also, to be clear: I reject your pushback based on my understanding of the incentives/goals/interests of nation states like China.

This is completely separate from my personal preferences or hopes about the future of AI.
Nukes are in control of the ruling class in perpetuity. AGI has the potential to overturn the current political order and remake it into something entirely unpredictable. Why the hell would an authoritarian regime want that? I strongly suspect China would take a way out of the AGI race if a legitimate one was offered.
I recognize and appreciate that this is free right now. But surely it won't always be. And I can't keep paying $10-20/mo for every individual AI tool.
Wouldn't it reflect better on her if she had been paid to promote the insane conspiracy theories? Falling for garbage-tier internet hoaxes is not a good look for any high-level official, especially in the field of intelligence, because it demonstrates a clear lack of critical thinking skills.
One such repeating case ended up settling for over $10B, so it was definitely worth it!

To clarify, they spent decades litigating the same fundamental issue for each year’s tax filings, with each filing year taking multiple years to get to court. The plaintiffs won every single case until the government finally settled all the remaining tax years for that amount. Each year prior was worth hundreds of millions.
We learned to stop sucking at onboarding
They have lifelong customers, but those also don't live forever and can change their opinion, and if the carmakers don't adapt, they won't survive. For the last 19 years we have been buying Toyota, but I'm slowly starting to look for a new car and it has to be an EV and Toyota is currently very underwhelming in that regard in our market.
DuckDB would've been a good example to be included, because it tries to target the need for horizontal scalability with an efficient implementation altogether. If your use case stays below the need for horizontal scalability (which in the modern world, mixture of clever implementation and crazy powerful computers do allow), then you can tackle quite a large workload.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made significant changes to USAID, sending thousands of employees home and removing the agency’s name. As a result, USAID contractors are facing about $700 million in unpaid invoices for work completed before the administration change. The situation is critical, particularly for smaller contractors who risk running out of cash.

The government is legally required to pay invoices within 30 days under the Prompt Payment Act, but no payments have been made, nor has there been communication about the delays. The lack of response is partly due to workforce disruptions at USAID, including administrative leave, terminations, and hiring freezes.

David Berteau, CEO of the Professional Services Council, warns that this nonpayment could increase the risk premium for doing business with the government, leading to higher costs. His organization has reached out to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also acting USAID administrator, urging him to resolve the issue. Meanwhile, budget uncertainties, continuing resolutions, and potential legal battles over impoundment laws add further complications.
So what did you understand that you did not know before?

Many people make the "opportunity to understand" claim, but I'm yet to hear anything meaningful coming out. Are you familiar with this joke: A guy decides to do drugs and keeps a notepad nearby to write down any profound revelations he has while high. The next morning he checks the notepad and finds he only wrote one thing: "The water is wet."
Is number of YouTube views the new metric for gauging how much “people care about learning to program”?
Actual answer: like this! https://codepen.io/Sfate/pen/kGbLzK
At my job I am not allowed to offer a job to a candidate unless I have first demonstrated to the VP of my org that I have interviewed a person or color.

This is literally the textbook definition of discrimination based on skin color and it is done under the guise of “equity”.

It is literally defined in the civil rights act as illegal (title VII).

It is very good that the new administration is doing away with it.
Heh. I still remember when we made fun of people for not being able to hack it on the terminal (and we were all still using screen back then to be productive). Tech is such an irrational pop culture. Nobody has respect for history, and anything old is automatically labeled elitist. Where did we go wrong?
FWIW I migrated ~70k Pinboard pins to Raindrop.io without a hitch.
Verizon Fios sells gigabit in NYC for $80/mo.

They're constantly running promotions "get free smartglases/video game systems/etc if you sign up for gigabit." Turns out that gigabit is still way more than most people need, even if it's 2025 and you spend hours per day online.
That is like using civilians as NPC.
Thanks, but I tend to ignore this. Every time you, as a direct end-user, provide feedback on format or software, someone appears with a whole philosophy around why you shouldn't be like that and what you should do instead. And sometimes there's no "why" part even.

But I really don't need philosophy. I know what I want, and I want json with $subj, //comments and optional key quoting. Feels like some people just love making inconvenient things standard and/or teaching others how to live. (I mean the idea "json is not for X" here, not your comment)
I use git through a GUI frontend and it does the same things git does in the same way, like being unable to do most things without checkout, because cli needs this implicit context.
NZ does not have a "successful programme of affirmative action".

Discrimination in favour of Maori students largely has benefited the children of Maori professionals and white people with a tiny percentage of Maori ancestry who take advantage of this discriminatory policy.

The Maori doctors and lawyers coming through these discriminatory programmes are not the people they were intended to target. Meanwhile, poor white children are essentially abandoned by the school system.

Maori were never actually excluded from university study, by the way. Maori were predominantly rural and secondary education was poor in rural areas but it has nothing to do with their ethnicity. They were never "forbidden". There have been Maori lawyers and doctors for as long as NZ has had universities.

For example, take Sir Apirana Ngata. He studied at a university in NZ in the 1890s, around the same time women got the vote. He was far from the first.

What you have alleged is a common narrative so I don't blame you for believing it but it is a lie.
Fun fact, a typical horse exerts about 1 horse power of usable work while performing. That's so weird, I'm sure almost no one would've been able to guess that - but it's true.

(To be clear, that's sustained effort over time, not just momentary. Athletically trained humans can do about 1 HP of peak momentary effort, and around 0.3 HP if sustained over time.)
An interesting SSH scam to be wary of
Lmao yeah, a hype train that began in checks notes 1987 when screen was released.

These children have zero knowledge of history or the craft itself, and I wish we could take away their computers.
The power budget alone is something no one is contemplating.

It is very hard to find a discussion about the growth and development of AI that doesn't discuss the issues around power budget.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/whit...

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/president...

In building domestic AI infrastructure, our Nation will also advance its leadership in the clean energy technologies needed to power the future economy, including geothermal, solar, wind, and nuclear energy; foster a vibrant, competitive, and open technology ecosystem in the United States, in which small companies can compete alongside large ones; maintain low consumer electricity prices; and help ensure that the development of AI infrastructure benefits the workers building it and communities near it.
Transformer is a holographic associative memory
TL/DR: In this paper, i demonstrate compelling case that the Transformer architecture is a holographic associative memory. The attention mechanism performs the Fourier Transform, the mathematical operation that describes holography. The MLP layer performs the inverse Fourier Transform, retuning information back to its original format. And the trainable parameters inside the Transformer act as a holographic film that records information. Transformers make predictions in a similar manner to how hopfield networks and holographic films perform pattern completions. If transformers work via holography, that opens a huge avenue for optimizing the transformer architecture, for example using physical light waves directly, instead of simulating them, which would result in 1000x increase of the training, processing speeds.
perhaps, i also believe this will create a caste, adept at acting outside thier age
Happy to answer any questions. This all seems very obvious in retrospect, but I wanted to share for any other early stage companies in the hopes people can avoid some scaling pains!
> OP's point has nothing to do with this, OP's point is that you can't stop it.

So what is your solution? Give up and die? It's worth trying. If it buys us a few years that's a few more years to figure out alignment.

> The methods and materials are too diffuse and the biggest players (nation states) have a strong incentive to be first.

So there's a strong incentive to convince them "stop racing towards death".

> Do you really expect China to coordinate with the West on this?

Yes, there have been concrete examples of willingness towards doing so.
You would be surprised. If you throw a good implementation of AI into a call center, which still hasn’t been done that often even though I have done a couple, if it even has a 30% success rate at helping users without you having to talk to an agent that’s a huge win.

Every time you interact with a live person at a call center it costs $3-$5 and many people would much rather not deal with outsourced call agent.
MusicBee https://www.getmusicbee.com/

Very (very) longtime user, with just under 10K albums I can peruse. Took me a while to tweak everything in the UI to my tastes, but now I can't imagine using anything else to listen to streaming music.

And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP's and CD's, the rest are from places like Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet).
What about Mazda?
Is this just a gut feeling or are there some specific reasons for why you think this?
Merges go wrong sometimes. That's life.

That mismerge would have been just as bad if they had rebased instead, except you wouldn't have had the context to go back and fix it. How would that be better?
FCC Investigates Radio Station over Coverage of Immigration Raid
> Systemd Adding Ability to Boot Directly into a Disk Image Downloaded via HTTP

Wow. RCE in the init process. That's the way to go. BTW, isn't he employed by Microsoft ?
Not sure if this is biology only (turned 50) or COVID or intense (work in my case) life, but I also distinctly feel that I am clearly not the same for the past ~5 years.

My self-diagnostic is mild burn out with a stressful work trying to get our start up to service, mild depression due I think to working remotely in my apartment, barely going outside even on weekend (my only human interactions are through zoom).

I am trying to improve, but it feels that the energy spent during the past 5 years to dig that hole, is equal to energy to get out of that hole... and honestly at this point, I don't know if I can.

Quitting could be an option, but I have been working since I was 20yo without interruption, never had to really interview, just got hired or pulled from current job. And that feels scary to me now over 50yo to quit and maybe change career for something more social and less taxing.

I honestly do not know how long I can keep doing what I am currently doing. I need to keep myself in check to make sure that I do not go too far in that hole.
Agree. And I think Vancouver BC's vacancy tax would have been even more successful if it had been sufficiently painful.
If you spend any time driving in a vacation to Spain, something went wrong.

I spend 6 weeks there last summer. I never drove, and our only cab was to the airport
We don’t move to higher frequencies just because we’ve run out of ways to pack more data into lower bands. The main reason is that higher frequencies offer much wider chunks of spectrum, which directly leads to higher potential data rates. Advanced modulation/coding techniques can squeeze more capacity out of lower bands, but there are fundamental physical and regulatory limits, like Shannon’s limit and the crowded/heavily licensed spectrum below 6 GHz that make it harder to keep increasing speeds at those lower frequencies.
Is there any SPAC company that is a success? It's ridiculous how VCs dumped the duds in their portfolio on the public with that mechanism.
I just leave mine in LTE and upgrade to 5G only when I know i'm gonna DL something big.
I do, because I'm a professional who needs to get work done, instead of dicking around in React all day and writing edgelord blog posts about 40-year-old tools.
Neuralink Rival Partners with Saudi Arabia's Neom on Brain Tech
not often a comment here makes an impact like that. wow - holy crap.
I was a little too young to really remember the early internet era and the skeptics, but looking back at that era in hindsight, it's interesting to see the commentary from those who thought it was a fad, or not impressive, or did everything to downplay what was so obviously one of the biggest technological advances in human history. I can't help but feel I am witnessing these same type of comments and viewpoints in real time from people like you on the subject of AI. It's a funny feeling, like watching a slow moving train wreck about to happen. There are going to be people left behind in the world because of their failure to adapt to the new tech, just like there was during the advent of the internet age, and it just seems so obvious already as to who those people are going to be.

"I just don't get what is so great about websites, they are just fancy books! It mostly just replaces going to the book store for me." - you of yesteryear
In what way? I assume you know how the minting of coins work with miners
Art as in craft/field! "State of the Art" is a phrase that refers to what is possible within a domain. There is also the implication that it takes judgement, maybe even an artistic sensibility. This is in opposition to a strain of thought within data viz from the Business Intelligence/Analytics side of the field that has succumbed to the MBA/Process gospel that preaches Repeatable Process and the siren song of good data visualization without using your brain!

Is Design an Art?
OpenAI Roadmap Update for GPT-4.5 and GPT-5
It would be nice to be able to have it read it to me with text to speech.

also, would be cool to have some kind of group based version.

none of which I would pay for so I'm probably not your target audience. you might be able to create an ad supported version. LLMs are getting pretty cheap so it might be able to make it cost effective.
You can remap the prefix key...