Teever

This should have been obvious to me before but for whatever reason reading your comment made me realize something.

The hardware that nvidia is selling can be used against them because it can generate the code that is lacking for hardware from other companies.

So there’s a world out there where Intel or AMD just generate the needed software with compute from rented Nvidia hardware or the end consumer does the same, akin to opensource volunteers spending their free time reverse engineering undocumented hardware for the last few decades.

That’s if the claim that other companies produce acceptable hardware that is mostly just kneecapped by poor software.

If that’s the case there’s a distinct chance that we’ll see feature parity between the different vendors soon enough.

Unless the models that run on nvidia hardware are inadequate for this task, but that sort of raises a catch-22 — if the models aren’t good enough to generate drivers and CUDA type software what are they good enough for?

Anytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it.

Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.

Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.

I'm sure it takes a lot of time and resources to plan and pull off an epic heist but it is unusual to see people like Thomas Crown being accused of creating value, as they're usually accused of committing theft.

You're sort of right. What the US is doing in Canada right now is more comparable to what Russia was doing in Ukraine in the early 2010s[0]

The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.

As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.

We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]

So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.

I don't want it to be this way, but it is.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ...

[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...

I don't think you can 100% ensure your queries have absolutely no biology and cyber keywords inside.

I’m pretty sure that I encountered this the other day. I gave it a copy of a paper by biologist Michael Levin and mentioned off hand that it should be much easier to replicate that his other work (because most of his work is biological lab work and this paper was about sorting algorithms) and it immediately told me that I couldn’t use Fable for this.

This just isn’t feasible. These jackasses spent the last few years telling the world that their products are going to destroy the world to make them seem edgy and to justify regulations that benefit the entrenched players and now they’re going to be the ones to decide what we do with this technology?

History is going to look back at this time and how we let such foolishly inconsistent people make such grand choices for everyone poorly.

It likely will.

The exact way you do something is dictated by your motivations and means to do it.

If you lack the correct motivation and have insufficient means you’re less likely to accomplish your goal and more likely to cause unintended side effects.

I worked at a hospital delivering food and I also went to school for CS and I heard about both opportunities to draw men to nursing and women to compsci.

The reason that you didn’t hear about them was that you weren’t looking in that area.

These kinds of programs have existed for decades. You've been wondering about that not because these programs weren't there but because you weren't looking for them.

There are a lot of good reasons why we want more men in nursing. For personal reasons some patients may respond better to interactions with men. Additionally men being on average larger and stronger then women is an advantage in a society with many overweight and obese people.

It's frustrating to see open source used as a tool to damage market competition and therefore consumer choice.

But it's also interesting to see that reality didn't quite turn out the way that Sam is musing here and instead other companies from other countries are doing to OpenAI what he wanted to do to the industry as a whole.

And yet some with similar actions but the roles reversed end consumers seem to be awash in free and paid models to use.

What did Altman get wrong here?

Hackernews users are not immune to developing parasocial relationships with strangers on the internet.

The fawning that some users do over others because of their careers is really unbecoming.

I wish the kind of people who did this stuff would realize that there are only two possibilities here -- the person they're saying it to cringes a little bit time they hear it because they're a normal person or they smile a bit inside because they're mildly narcissistic and therefore not worthy of the incessant praise.

The best thing you can do for everyone involved is to treat people normally and not elevate people to celebrity status.

I wonder how a blackout on usernames for a day or so after they're posted would shape conversation here.

Copyrights and patents don’t exist for the purposes of maximum economic value extraction for inventors and authors.

They exist to maximize the production of scientific and artistic works and do so by incentivizing creators with a limited exclusionary property right over the created work.

If the goal of this particular section were to maximize what authors and inventors can extract from their creations then explicitly assigning to them the property rights in perpetuity of said creations would have been the way to ensure that outcome.

Given that they specifically wrote "by securing for limited Times" it is entirely reasonable to make this interpretation and I'm not sure why you weren't taught this interpretation in law school -- it's a pretty settled thing and there have been many times that this subject has come up in US courts over the years.

And this isn't so whack if you stop and think about it. There are all kinds of limitations on intellectual property rights.

Like take trade secret protection for exampple -- it has no term limit and no disclosure requirement. If maximum extraction were the goal then patents would look like trade secrets. Instead the bargain that the patent system forces on creators requires them to publish their invention and then hands the rights to that invention to the public after a finite period of time. The system is explicitly designed to be less extractive compared to others on purpose.

And if copyright is built for maximum extraction why does it carve out an affirmative defense in the form of fair use for others to use copyrighted works without paying? Same with first sale, same with the idea/expression dichotomy -- so much of the antisocial contemporary intellectual property regime is configured around providing people free access to the use of intellectual property.

There is quite literally no other reason for granting a copyright or patent.

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

It seems pretty clear to me from that sentence that the stated purpose of these laws was to drive the creation of science and art and that a limited time profit incentive being enshrined in law was merely a carrot to create an incentive for that.

The framers understood the complex interplay between property rights, freedoms, and incentives in driving innovation and creation.

Knowing that granting someone an exclusive right to something that isn't subject to finite physical limitations effectively denies everyone else in society that same right the framers still understood that it was necessary to abridge the freedoms of some to enrich society as a whole through the development of science and art.

In choosing to use the words "for limited times" the framers encoded the economic priority of the majority of society over the economic priority of the minority of creators into this section but they also did not give a specific time which to me speaks to their understanding of the complexity the interplay between all the factors and allowed for the possibility that they could change over time.

On damages: that's a non-sequitur. How a system enforces an entitlement once created tells you nothing about why it was created. Tort damages compensate plaintiffs but nobody woudl say that tort law exists to maximize plaintiff recovery.

It isn't in dispute that people respond to incentives. That's precisely why the size of the incentives and the configuration of the incentive structure matters and why we have things like term limits and fair use.

Can you elaborate on your comment?

I can see the link between it and the subject that I raised but I don't understand the point that you're trying to make in the context of the conversation.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.

A $13 billion dollar Meta datacentre was recently announced for a location near me: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/meta-data-centre-alb...

There's a kaleidoscope of issues with this that result in strong feelings of dismay and it took me a couple days of thinking about this recent announcement before I realized what's so completely disappointing about it.

So they're installing a $13 billion dollar data centre that's going to pull 1-1.8GW of power, dumping the resulting pollution onto the people in my province and the land they live on. It's probably going to mess up the groundwater int he area. And it's going to mess with the prices prices electricity and natural gas. And this is all at the whim of one person -- Mark Zuckerberg because with 61% of the voting power of Meta he is Meta. And the C02 emissions... Yadda yadda yadda, we all know the drill with these conversations.

But none of that is the worst part.

The worst part to me is that the heat energy from this 1-1.8gw operation is going to be completely wasted and dumped into the atmosphere. No attempt to use it for anything else.

In a different world the Alberta government wasn't so inept and self-serving and sheltered from the consequences of being so that they capitalized on an opportunity to bootstrap a heated greenhouse industry in central Alberta from the waste energy of a Meta funded datacentre.

In a different world Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so self-centered and sheltered from the consequences of being so that he would seize on an opportunity to feed hundreds of thousands to millions of people with his table scraps.

But that isn't the kind of world we live in.

And there's nothing that can be done about that.

It makes the kind of waste that Steinbeck so sorrowfully described in The Grapes of Wrath seem quaint.

Is it the case that Canada has been implemented substantial forest fire prevention practices?

I’m not an expert in forestry. It it doesn’t seem feasible that Canada was every really doing any large scale forest fire prevention simply due to the scale of the country and forests within it.

I recently came across a video of the author discussing this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05375

I’ve been mulling it over the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Oops! https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/bill-gates-face-us-...

You don’t need to waste time with the histrionics — You know what they meant. They’re assuming that these people are guilty and are found guilty and that the only reflexive courts we have are the ones that reflexively don’t take action against this kind of heinous behaviour that has already doomed hundreds millions to horrible deaths.

This is an odd response. I've been to countries that have special tourist police trained in english who frequent tourist locations to prevent this kind of behaviour.

I've never experienced it personally but I've heard stories from other travellers who said that they actually went and got a cop to mediate a despite like this and the cop reamed the merchant out and made him apologize in front of other customers and hand the disputed money back.

Some places understand that perpetuating this kind of fraud against an evergreen pool of tourist marks while lucrative to the individual is ultimately damaging to the whole commons that is the tourist industry for the region.

What happens if a tourist refuses to pay the fee? Or asks for resolution by a neutral third party like law enforcement?

Seems like a kind of practice that could quickly become impractical if people simply DDOS it by disputing it.

There are amateurs chasing the speed record using similar designs too: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world%27s%20fas...

Unit cost for a lot of these seems to be under ~$5K USD, not counting the value of engineering time.

How do you counter a swarm of these things coming from all directions?

This kind of weapon has interesting consequences for public speaking events by leaders. Or large industrial projects on the coast of Texas that use large tanks of compressed methane and LOX.

This seems like the kind of thing that you can send in the mail to another country in a special box that can open up when it senses that it has arrived at a destination so the drone can fly off to get into position for an attack by hiding itself in some nook on the roof of some nearby industrial building.

Put a small solar panel on it so that it can sit indefinitely, waiting for the signal to strike a target.

Or put a dozen or so of them on an unmanned surface vehicle like the Ukrainians did and send them out to a juicy port target.

The biggest threat that a weapon like this poses isn't just from the initial destructive capacity, it comes from the possible difficulty in attributing the source of the attack.

How do you respond to this kind of weapon you don't know who used it against you?

I loved that game. You may me excited to know that there was a song from the developers on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuV4Oe9n5T0

I find it interesting how many people come out of the wood work to make disparaging comments about people who use cannabis whenever the subject of cannabis use comes up on HN.

Having lived in a country where cannabis has been legal for about a decade now it's quaint seeing this kind of casual disrespect levelled by a stranger.

I wonder if this kind of mindset is still common here and people just don't vocalize it anymore, or if it's the kind of mentality that continued criminalization perpetuates.

I get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches.

Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added.

Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.

It isn't in dispute that it got worse.

Most of us have worked at a place that was either bad enough that we knew and didn't say anything or that we should have known was that bad. That isn't anything new. You do what you gotta do and all that.

What we're splitting hairs over is whether or not Google (and others) were already "too bad to work for" 10-15 years ago. And whether or not some people correctly identified this and others didn't / did but say that they didn't.

You're totally right -- very few of us have careers entirely at places like UNICEF. That's just reality. What isn't reality is the image some people like to portray that they didn't know or couldn't have reasonably known that the entity that they were a part of for so many years was no UNICEF.

It's too convenient that so many of these stories go something like "It was okay when I joined but somewhere along the way things there got dirty, but I'm still clean!"

Why is it always that way?

Why is no one ever writing "It was always dirty there but I convinced myself that it wasn't until I couldn't do it anymore."

Because people don't want to admit "I made a mistake."

That's why.

Was it different or are the people who voluntarily started working for Google around that period unable to admit to themselves and others that it was always questionable to work for a entity like Google?

To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.

What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?

the switch line is nearly impossible

Werent early versions of the Switch 1 jail broken pretty fast and people were dumping switch 1 roms online to play in emulators?

I don’t follow this stuff too closely but I thought that I saw people playing the sequel to Breath of the Wild on PCs to get acceptable frame rates when it came out.

But is there enough of a market for blu-rays of newer western releases in Japan to keep the entire production and distribution chain alive around the rest of the world?

Right? Like the through line for all of this stuff is limp and ineffective enforcement.

Fines need to start doubling for every time one of these companies reoffend.