allday

Got any links?

Because, if they announced it and it seemed plausible or even possible that they were correct, then every media outlet, regulatory body, intelligence agency, and Fortune 500 C-suite would blanket OpenAI in the thickest veil of scrutiny to have ever existed in the modern era. Progress would grind to a halt and eventually, through some combination of legal, corporate, and legislative maneuvers, all decision making around the future of AGI would be pried away from Ilya and OpenAI in general - for better or worse.

But if there's one thing that seems very easy to discern about Ilya, it's that he fully believes that when it comes to AI safety and alignment, the buck must stop with him. Giving that control over to government bureaucracy/gerontocracy would be unacceptable. And who knows, maybe he's right.

Our onboarding docs specifically tell employees to NOT use Google Authenticator precisely because of this issue. I have no idea how Google let this fester for so long, literally if even one (1) person over there was using it and got a new phone, they should have known about the issue.

This thought crosses my mind a lot too. When we're working with code, we're shaping information into structures and patterns. And so our brains are tasked with translating those structures and patterns into text, making sure that text is written exactly right, and reconciling the difference in the observed output of structures and patterns with the text we've written. What if we could stay at that higher level of abstraction?

My de facto example of this that I keep coming back to is syntax highlighting. It's immensely useful, and yet once you get used to it, the brain is able to skip the (conscious) step of breaking it down e.g. "this text is green so it means it is a function name, so the next text should be blue because they are function parameters", etc. It's more like "okay, green, blue, bunch of stuff between the braces, checks out". Indentation, squiggly line error highlighting, etc. all serve a similar purpose. They rely on our minds' fundamental ability to recognize visual patterns without having to fully process them through our language centers.

So I feel like there is a huge unexplored space there for more efficient and natural programming. VR with 3D representations of code as, I dunno, pipes, gears, something like that? Function declarations in specific colors and then call sites in mixed colors when one function is called from another? Anything to reduce the friction from thought to working software without having to worry about syntax.

This is all very abstract and I probably haven't explained it well, but it's one of those things I can't shake because I'm fairly sure there's something there.

I love that I can count on the Top Minds of Hacker News to tie themselves into knots debating whether or not it is morally and ethically justifiable to try to stop the We-Kidnap-Children-And-Put-Them-In-Cages Agency from doing their job.

  Maybe some poor don’t get the best care quickly

  an electrical engineer is more useful than an unemployed cashier

  low value people

  It’s logical

Wow, this story is annoying me a lot more than I expected. There's a whole lot of shaming of the layperson in here, with a wink wink nudge nudge that if people would just _think a little_, they could save themselves a lot of trouble.

Graphics like these need to be read closely and carefully. Only then can we grasp what they're really saying.

Well, that's ridiculous. If these graphics were in an app, we'd tear them apart for the poor user experience. Look at this: https://imgur.com/a/Ko2Z4uM

There is nothing there to indicate that what you're looking at is the probability distribution of the center of the storm. The very obvious interpretation of this graphic, without additional context, is that this cone is the area that could be affected by the hurricane. This is reinforced by:

1. The size of the start of the cone is the same as the size of the hurricane 2. There is a well defined border to the path 3. There is no additional shading outside the cone that indicates "could also face danger"

Furthermore, "probable path of the storm center" is not something the general public cares about! That is not the question that needs answered! What people want to know is, "will I be in the path of the hurricane?"

Even the official NHC product has its faults: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT05/refresh/AL05201...

There is a big box with a bunch of text at the top of the graphic saying that it is showing the probable path of the storm's center, but does not show the size of the storm. This is different than saying "the storm may extend beyond the edges of the cone". And the next line is "hazardous conditions may occur outside the cone." Okay, every time there's a thunderstorm or 50mph wind gusts, there's an alert in my weather app about hazardous conditions. That information is too vague to be actionable. This doesn't even touch on the design aspects of this graphic, such as how the massive amount of text, size, color, spacing, etc, seems to draw the eye away from that message at the top.

But getting back to a point from a previous paragraph, why is this even disseminated widely at all, when this graphic is so misleading and also not what people need to know? Is it the NHS pushing it out to the public? Is it the media? It seems wildly irresponsible. The tropical storm force wind speeds graphic mentioned in TFA would be a much better product to deliver. Or, just create a graphic that is what the article has already identified as the natural interpretation - a cone of the possible area that could be affected by the hurricane!

Sorry, but excuses for poor design are a real pet peeve of mine.

If anyone from Stripe is reading this, I do hope a significant amount of support goes to Project Vesta. I have not seen a better sequestration strategy, in that olivine weathering is both a long term CO2 sink, and -also- helps deacidify the oceans. I have no affiliation with Project Vesta, I'm just very excited by it.

My question for the Vesta folk is, what is the current status of the project? There is a timeline on your website but no indication of how close any of these stages are to being a reality. What are the blockers, who can help, when will you "start shipping", as it were?

"I wish they would have addressed the price and convenience issues and not made it such a question of morality", I say, as I eat a handful of dirt and survey the barren lifeless landscape around me.

Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them.

That's fine. When the choice is not having some luxury items vs total biosphere collapse, I'll side with the former. I guess you'd rather keep sipping your Diet Coke while the world burns.

Yeah, after a long stretch of trying "proper" cheeses on burgers, I've gone back to using Kraft singles. Even Kenji Lopez-Alt recommends American cheese for burgers, so I don't feel so bad about it.

In our little corner of northeast Ohio (east side inner ring Cleveland suburbs), the -majority- of homes use steam heating, as they were constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century. Never quite occurred to me that this is a historical/geographical oddity.

There's at least one HVAC company around here that still specializes in boilers and radiators. We had our boiler replaced last year and the system tuned up - there's hardly any water hammer or hissing now and as other commenters have mentioned, the heat feels great.

Save on compensation due to hiring in lower cost regions

Pay people what they're worth regardless of where they live. If you have a developer in Nigeria or Ukraine or Vietnam that is as equally capable as a developer in the Bay Area, they should be paid the same.

Doing otherwise, at best, perpetuates Western hegemony, and at worst is simply racism.

Hell, I suggest that we disband the police entirely.

The biggest challenge to making remote workers successful is the existing company culture. If the organization has not been built with a conscious "remote-first" mindset, new remote collaborators will inevitably be excluded from necessary communications and decisions. Making a remote worker a true part of the team requires a massive culture shift if your company does not already (successfully) do distributed work.