skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ‘One token at a time’ is how a model generates its output, not how it comes up with that output.

I do not believe you are correct.

Now, yes, when we write printf("Hello, world\n"), of course the characters 'H', 'e', ... are output one at a time into the stream. But the program has the string all at once. It was prepared before the program was even run.

This is not what LLMs are doing with tokens; they have not prepared a batch of tokens which they are shifting out left-to-right from a dumb buffer. They output a token when they have calculated it, and are sure that the token will not have to be backtracked over. In doing so they might have calculated additional tokens, and backtracked over those, sure, and undoubtedly are carrying state from such activities into the next token prediction.

But the fact is they reach a decision where they commit to a certain output token, and have not yet committed to what the next one will be. Maybe it's narrowed down already to only a few candidates; but that doesn't change that there is a sharp horizon between committed and unknown which moves from left to right.

Responses can be large. Think about how mind boggling it is that the machine can be sure that the first 10 words of a 10,000 word response are the right ones (having put them out already beyond possibility of backtracking), at a point where it has no idea what the last 10 will be. Maybe there are some activations which are narrowing down what the second batch of 10 words will be, but surely the last ones are distant.
Yes, I've heard that analogy before, but it's more of a question than an answer: is there an unbridgeable gap that prevents continuous improvement, or not?

Researchers will have to figure out whether such a gap exists.

Since I'm speculating, not making a claim, there's no fallacy here.
This reminds me of

https://github.com/progrium/envy

https://vimeo.com/131329120
Really? I just get garbage. Both Claude and CoPilot kept insisting that it was ok to use react hooks outside of function components. There have been many other situations where it gave me some code and even after refining the prompt it just gave me wrong or non working code. I’m not expecting perfection, but at least don’t waste my time with hallucinations or just flat out stuff that doesn’t work.
It's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles.

All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution.

It gets frustrating
It’s not reduction, it’s killing checks and balances.
I used to be skeptical of the hype but it's hard to deny that they are incredible tools. For coding, they save me a few hours a week and this is just the beginning. A few months ago I would use them to generate simple pieces of code, but now they can handle refactoring across several files. Even if LLMs don't get smarter, the tooling around them will improve and they'll be even more useful. We'll also learn to use them better.

Also my gf who's not particularly tech savvy relies heavily on ChatGPT for her work. It's very useful for a variety of text (translation, summaries, answering some emails).

Maybe Sabine Hossenfelder tries to use them for things they can't do well and she's not aware that they work for other use cases.
One thing I've tried it is to phrase it something like ...

"I'm not sure if you're aware, but you are chewing quite loudly"

Tone (neutral) is important. Sometimes they genuinely aren't aware. They know it's theoretically a social faux pas but never thought to check themselves.

I think they've grown up around loud eaters.
It can be an amazing technology and the valuation for companies be completely wrong.

We saw this with the web. Pet.com was not a billion dollar company but the web was real.

I am actually of the belief that LLMs will be amazing but that rank and file companies are going to be the ones that benefit the most.

Just like the internet.
That is great, hopefully it continues.

I am far from a heavy WP/Spreadsheet user, usually Emacs for me, but at work I need to mess with spreadsheets. I use LibreOffice for that and to me there is no difference.
Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear:

-5--2°C

post-war-pre-digital era

See sections 10-O-15-Q

Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!
A few years back a journal editor maticulously reviewed all dashes in our manuscript and pointed out places where em dashes should have been used. Since then I started noticing different dashes everywhere around the internet.
Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified button masquerades as two icons?

Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed into GNOME at some point.

It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME any. day.
Thanks for the positive feedback! If you can share them please do!

BTW I'm working on ideas to make code a secondary artifact right now, sort of v2 of mycoder.
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[Final Answer]

Language models like Claude are programmed directly by humans.
I think you hit on a key part. You have to adjust a bit so that AI doesn’t allow anyone to pass through your process.

Like I used to do small writing samples from most candidates. That’s gone now and for client facing roles, I replaced it with mock meetings. I send over prep material + meeting goal and then let the candidate lead a 20 minute meeting with me playing the client. At the end we talk about how it went.

I see candidates who clearly used AI to prep and kill it and then candidates who did little prep (AI or otherwise) and try to wing it.
I wonder if you could bit-bang PS2 from the host side - though this is probably one of those things where we need to "consider if we should."
"It talks to me like a person."

No, it provides responses. It does not talk.
Have you considered that the problems you encounter in daily life just happen to be more present in the training data than problems other users encounter?

Stitching together well-known web technologies and protocols in well-known patterns, probably a good success rate.

Solving issues in legacy codebases using proprietary technologies and protocols, and non-standard patterns. Probably not such a good success rate.
I think it's reasonably trustworthy for a popular health site, but if I used Kagi I would block Healthline myself. Their Top N lists frequently appear on top of my health related searches when I'm looking for something more scholarly.
Everyone dogpiling on you is incorrect. This has been my experience as well.

I swear half my job these days is helping australian businesses retroactively purge themselves of plaintext card data.

I have seen some shit man.
A popular myth, it seems to be made-up from a way-less-interesting statement about a single specific model of computer during a 1953 stockholder meeting:

> IBM had developed a paper plan for such a machine and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the [IBM 701] machine rents for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18.
i used to run debian on an intel macbook air. regular debian. was pretty nice.
In 1930 about 1/4 of income was spent on food. In 1950 it dropped to 1/5. Today we're at less than 1/10. Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013/august/price-infla... https://cepr.net/publications/in-the-good-old-days-one-fourt... And the price of food was definitely a consideration in debates over school lunches in earlier years: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/exhibition/food-power-an...

Also, to suggest food has never been expensive in the United States seems quite a hyperbolic statement to make given the history of poverty in the 19th and early 20th centuries, at least up to the New Deal. You seem to be making a social (laziness) or political (greedy powers-that-be) point, but it's sort of irrelevant to people, including working class people.
I wonder if the pin connection is standard across manufacturers that do this. I assume anyone coming after microsoft's mouse release copied them.
It's also a red flag to hear "it is trivial to show that it can do things literally impossible even 5 years ago" 10 comments deep without anybody doing exactly that...
And that might have been true for a period of time. Advancements made it so they could become smaller and more efficient, and opened up a new market.

LLMs today feel like the former, but are being marketed as the latter. Fully believe that advancements will make them better, but in their current state they're being touted for their possibilities, not their actual capabilities.

I'm for using AI now as the tool they are, but AI is a while off taking senior development jobs. So when I see them being hyped for doing that it just feels like a hype bubble.
EditContext API
The biggest issue I had migrating as a Photoshop user since 1996 was the key bindings. But using the config files people shared online sorted that.

I'm not going to link to a specific one implying I'm recommending it, but a web search will show multiple.

One important gimp note is if you don't have 3.0+ already, get it. It finally has non-destructive editing, which is the main reason I had to keep using ps for for a long time.
Huh, incandescents have been banned here (Australia) for years. Even compact fluorescents are out.
>> unaided humans cannot operate successfully in many situations

> Absolute nonsense driven by a total lack of historical perspective or knowledge.

An LLM can give you a list of examples:

Historical Examples:

- During historical epidemics, structured record-keeping and statistical analysis (such as John Snow’s cholera maps in 1854) significantly improved outcomes.

- Development of physics, architecture, and engineering depended heavily on tools such as abacus, logarithmic tables, calculators, slide rules, to supplement human cognitive limitations.

- Astronomical calculations in ancient civilizations (Babylonian, Greek, Mayan) depended heavily on abacuses, tables, and other computational tools.

- The pyramids in ancient Egypt required extensive use of tools, mathematics, coordinated human labor, and sophisticated organization.
Good luck with that. People get send to prison for decades, for other people's bullshit all the time!

I will take LLM over real person anytime! At least it does not get b*hurt when I double check!
Honestly cool to see a story like this where the punchline isnt "They never fixed the bug" or "They sent goons after me".
Speaking of, I just bought a brand new M4 Air. The thing is amazing, except I swear that Command-Tab does not work consistently sometimes, it just does nothing and I have to press it again. It's baffling, has anyone had this before? Never had this issue on any computer in the past 20 years, it's strange.
Audio Output Devices API
> Maybe Sabine Hossenfelder tries to use them for things they can't do well and she's not aware that they work for other use cases.

Yeah. That was my first thought. There’s probably orders of magnitude more training data for software engineering than for theoretical physics (her field). Also, how much of software engineering is truly novel? Probably someone else has already come up with a decent solution to your problem, it’s “just” a matter of finding it.
> My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative.

The same is true about the internet, and people even used to use these arguments to try to dissuade people from getting their information online (back when Wikipedia was considered a running joke, and journalists mocked blogs). But today it would be considered silly to dissuade someone from using the internet just because the information there is extremely unreliable.

Many programmers will say Stack Overflow is invaluable, but it's also unreliable. The answer is to use it as a tool and a jumping off point to help you solve your problem, not to assume that its authoritative.

The strange thing to me these days is the number of people who will talk about the problems with misinformation coming from LLMs, but then who seem to uncritically believe all sorts of other misinformation they encounter online, in the media, or through friends.

Yes, you need to verify the information you're getting, and this applies to far more than just LLMs.
By this argument the DEA is the FBI because they are also a federal bureau that does investigations.
For many people yes, because that 20k isn't being added to the mortgage, so it isn't easily financed over a long period of time with low interest. These days, many people are stretched to meet the minimum down payment and won't have 20k extra to throw at a problem like this.
at a prev us tech job, a few years in they made all engineer have oncall, with no compensation added whatsoever, and on call for other teams code in india.

i got pages a few times and didnt exactly rush to ack. not slow but didnt rush. the rotations increased more and more (mostly from other US employees quitting) till i quit. scummy company
I believe they was actually the number they expected to get orders for on one particular sales tour.
I would say we engineered the system that trained them but we never really understood the data (human thinking).
Privacy Without Compromise: Proton VPN Is Now Built into Vivaldi
Decline of cash credited for drop in NHS surgery for children swallowing objects
Sure. I don't use GPT-3.5-Turbo for similar reasons. I fired it.
Can you describe the connection between the "VM" and the "MPC" implementation. The project is described as a VM for Multiparty computation, but (currently) doesn't do MPC? Implying its currently just a certain kind of VM?

Genuinely curious, fan of any tooling that makes writing MPC protocols easier.
No the bullshit jobs I see people complain about are often linked to "Couldnt someone automate this" like taking notes from inbound phonecalls and simply relaying messages inside the office.
It makes engineers a hell of a lot more efficient and opens up software to a whole new class of people. There is plenty of data to back this up.

Based on that alone it’s worth quite a lot.
We have an older mobile home on a rural lot in the middle of nowhere, and by far one of the best quality of life improvements we’ve made to it is awnings that were designed to let the sun in during the winter but not in the summer. In the winter we keep the furnace set at about 68F there during the day (65F at night) and on good sunny days it can be -20F outside and up to 73F or 74F in the living room!

In the summer without running the AC it would get up to 85-90F in there while only 70F outside… with the awnings we barely need the air conditioner most of the time. Still do on days when the outside air temperate is oppressive, but the place isn’t a greenhouse all summer!
I use them as well. For blog posts I suppose I'll need to switch to regular hyphens lest people think all my writing is LLM-spam.

That said, I don't even think you need the [shift] for em dash on Mac – just [option] + [hyphen] works for me.
It is a disorder, though. It's not a preference that people have for manners, the brain is just wired differently.
some of the people I know who've made it work, and I'm not recommending this either, are "hardworking ambitious immigrant" types who do it to hold down two full time jobs. tends to be in industries where the overnight shift is a quiet shift rather than something like running the same factory at full tilt overnight.
Using search as a UI means you can only find things that you know exist, but there are plenty of important settings that I've only discovered by actually navigating through the UI.
I don't object to abstracting, at all; or reducing labor in general.

But this method of getting there makes me feel like I'm degraded to being the assistant and the machine is pulling my strings; and as a result I become dumber the more I do it, more dependent on crap tech.
I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
Sure, that is just as true.
No, I don't. Because I know it does and it's incredibly easy to type something into Google Scholar and see if a reference exists.

Like, I can ask a friend and they'll mistakenly make up a reference. "Yeah, didn't so-and-so write a paper on that? Oh they didn't? Oh never mind, I must have been thinking of something else." Does that mean I should never ask my friend about anything ever again?

Nobody should be using these as sources of infallible truth. That's a bonkers attitude. We should be using them as insanely knowledgeable tutors who are sometimes wrong. Ask and then verify.

The net benefit is huge.
This. 100% this.

LLMs will spit out responses with zero backing with 100% conviction. People see citations and assume it's correct. We're conditioned for it thanks to....everything ever in history. Rarely do I need to check a wikipedia entry's source.

So why do people not understand that: this is absolutely going to pour jet fuel on misinformation in the world. And we as a society are allowed to hold a bar higher for what we'll accept get shoved down our throats by corporate overlords that want their VC payout.
Glad to see the party of “cut funding to cancer research to stop waste & fraud” is also the same party of “actually convicted acts of fraud should be legal”.
I have had both amazing results, and really shit results.

Like I had it write a cool opening chapter to a short story based on nothing but my notes.

And another time, I had a boxer punch someone 2 floors above him on a balcony.
I think you're on the wrong website sir.
In the way that the more you do that, the less you have any clue what you're doing. Because you're not learning, you're following instructions. Being programmed, if you will.
Then they should be happy that their novel has either maintained or increased its value due to its humaniness.
Animojis really feel like peak corporate board asking, "What do the kids like these days?" and dumping that shit into the world. Honestly ... AVERAGE age of the Apple board is 68!! This is a company that's reached some sort of corporate red giant stage where it's influence is massive but it's ability to grow is over and it's only real purpose is to generate heavy metals and seed them throughout the rest of the universe after it's eventual explosive death.
That's natural. Kagi users are mostly techies and techies skew left.
Currently also looking at Framework+AMD.

I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch segment which is my favorite.
Using a pretty old laptop because there is no replacement right now.

The new Ryzen AI looks really interesting!
Sadly there is no Framework shop for me to look at it and they not ship to Japan..
> How do you handle multiple copies of the same key? Does the order of keys have semantic meaning?

This is also an issue, due to the way that order of keys are working in JavaScript, too.

> record separator separated JSON, newline separated JSON.

There is also JSON with no separators, although that will not work very well if any of the top-level values are numbers.

> Also, encoding things like IEEE NaN/Infinity, and raw byte arrays has to be in proprietary ways.

Yes, as well as non-Unicode text (including (but not limited to) file names on some systems), and (depending on the implementation) 64-bit integers and big integers. Possibly also date/time.

I think DER avoids these problems. You can specify whether or not the order matters, you can store Unicode and non-Unicode text, NaN and Infinity, raw byte arrays, big integers, and date/time. (It avoids some other problems as well, including canonization (DER is already in canonical form) and other issues. Although, I have a variant of DER that avoids some of the excessive date/time types and adds a few additional types, but this does not affect the framing, which can still be parsed in the same way.)

A variant called "Multi-DER" could be made up, which is simply concatenating any number of DER files together. Converting Multi-DER to BER is easy just by adding a constant prefix and suffix. Converting Multi-DER to DER is almost as easy; you will need the length (in bytes) of the Multi-DER file and then add a prefix to specify the length. (In none of these cases does it require parsing or inspecting or modifying the data at all. However, converting the JSON variants into ordinary JSON does require inspecting the data in order to figure out where to add the commas.)
how can you care when all your stress is aimed towards staying alive
How to Compost in NYC: A Guide
If the solution to "devices not setting up" was "udevadm trigger" and it took an LLM suggestion to get there, I question your google skills.

When I google "linux device not initializing correctly", someone suggesting "udevadm trigger" is the 5th result
Google Ad team can dictate to the Search team. We have the leaks. Google has sold out.
If we could motivate the monkies sufficiently with bananas, we'd probably improve those odds substantially.
I think you mean XP SP2?
Billionaires are an insignificant rounding error in the total production of CO2 on the planet. 50 top billionaires make 1200x CO2 of the average person [1]. Considering there's less than 2,200 of them (< 0.000025% of the population), that makes sense. They can could produce over twenty thousand times more than the average person while staying under a percent. They're disproportionate, but shooting them into the sun leaves us precisely where we are, to many significant digits.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...
Good thing then that this is a LinkedIn replacement ;)
I'm a Windows fan (I actually really like 11) so I'm a bit biased, but I just dove back into macOS since 2014 and the settings app is truly terrible. The built in search barely works and the layout is so damn confusing. God forbid I install some remote desktop software, now I have to go to accessibility settings 5 simes and approve some permission that is strategically buried for only what I can tell as a way to thwart "normies" from enabling something via obfuscation.

It would be fine if the settings available were actually useful or at least could bring me to some tool that does it better. I get no meaningful report of what's eating my batter and why every time I open my MacBook it's dead. And if I want to change the actual resolution of my display I'm given just a list of scaling options pretending to be resolutions. Oh, want to set a specific resolution or refresh rate? You have to do some stupid kinger king foo of option control something _before_ you click on this dialog. I get the criticism about the Windows settings app and legacy power tools (I think this has largely been solved anyway), at least they exist and allow me some iota of control over my computer
It's like computer graphics and VR: Amazing advances over the years, very impressive, fun, cool, and by no means a temporary fad...

... But I do not believe we're on the cusp of a Lawnmower-Man future where someone's Metaverse eats all the retail-conference-halls and movie-theaters and retail-stores across the entire globe in an unbridled orgy of mind-shattering investor returns.

Similarly, LLMs are neat and have some sane uses, but the fervor about how we're about to invent the Omnimind and usher in the singularity and take over the (economic) world? Nah.