apeace

It was super disorienting for me to see the cursor pointing different directions depending on which direction it was moving.

I wonder if 1) it's actually going to be like that and not just an aesthetic for the ad, and 2) if I would ever get used to a cursor working that way.

The body language thing really bothers me.

Personally, if someone accuses me of lying, but I am actually telling the truth, I immediately start acting like a liar. It's really embarrassing and hard to explain. I can't believe such a seasoned reporter is leaning so hard on "his face went red."

I have always thought Satoshi must be dead (as a couple of past suspects are).

How could someone not want one hundred BILLION dollars? There is no person alive who could resist that. I'm sorry, there's just not.

To be fair, if Back was Satoshi, he would need to hide it so his company can go public, or whatever. Because that way he might make -- who knows! -- hundreds of millions of dollars?

Even if moving the coins crashed the Bitcoin price by 90%, Satoshi would still be a billionaire. Generational wealth.

Pardon me, but I think it's rather obvious that it worked this way?

The real value of Anthropic is in the models that they spent hundreds of millions training. Anyone can build a frontend that does a loop, using the model to call tools and accomplish a task. People do it every day.

Sure, they've worked hard to perfect this particular frontend. But it's not like any of this is revolutionary.

How does Brave survive financially?

I was confused by "main menu" so I took a look and it is in the Help menu, for those wondering (I'm on Mac).

I didn't know this existed but will totally use it now! Thanks!

There is also Firefox Focus. Been using it on iOS since it came out a few years ago.

It integrates as an ad blocker for Safari, so I don't actually use Firefox itself (since as you mentioned, all browsers on iOS are just a wrapper to Safari anyways).

I just browse using Safari and ads are blocked by Firefox Focus. Pretty neat.

The only thing that really worked was sending so many rat reports to the city that they had to keep coming out to bait the burrows in the neighbors small yard, until they likely talked to the owner directly to do something about it.

I was recently deputized into the "Rat Pack" of New York City[1].

The main thing I learned is that exactly what you said is true. When there are rat problems, you have to go to the source. Traps/poison in a localized area is not going to work, as the brown rat is easily able to reproduce faster than we can kill them with those methods.

In fact, certain methods have ended up helping the rats. At one point the city put out thousands of boxes with poison in them. The problem is the boxes were designed to be nice and cozy for the rats, so they'd be tempted to go in and eat the poison. Instead, they go in there and mate. (They also use the boxes to evade predators).

NYC's current strategy is to improve data collection on rats, and then use that data to better enforce standards (like garbage disposal), eradicate burrows, and plant different shrubs that aren't as friendly to rats. You have to fully eliminate the environments that sustain them, you can't exterminate your way out.

Always report rat sightings in your area!

[1] https://www.nycservice.org/opportunity/a0TQq00000DwaIoMAJ/ny...

To add to this: the author is missing a major aspect of the Jevons paradox.

They keep referencing "more efficient software developers," but the Jevons paradox isn't only about efficiency. The efficiency creates lower cost, which in turn increases demand.

The main cost of software is software engineers. It's a specialized skill, so it's a high-salary job.

With AI doing most of the work, salaries will begin to fall. It will no longer make sense to study computer science, or spend years learning to code, for such a low salary. There will no longer be people doing what we call software engineering today.

So the author is right, Jevons paradox will take effect. But like I said above, it will replace the current industry with a very different-looking industry.

The job of "software engineer" as we know it will end.

Before the industrial revolution, shoemakers would make shoes. It was a specialized skill, meaning shoes were very expensive, so most people couldn't afford them.

Then factories were invented. Now shoes could be made cheaply and quickly, by machines, so more people could afford them. This meant that far more people could be employed in the shoe industry.

But those people were no longer shoemakers. Shoemakers were wiped out overnight.

Think of how huge the shoe industry is now. There are jobs ranging from factory worker to marketing manager. But there are zero shoemakers.

AI writing software doesn't mean it's the end of the industry. Humanity will benefit greatly, just like we did from getting cheaper shoes.

But the software engineers are screwed.

the ones who dare to disrespect the sign

The idea discussed in the article is how do we make a sign which can even be understood in 10,000 years? They need to understand we are saying "bad, stay away" in order for them to even know if they disrespect it. There is a risk they think we're saying "this is great, come and see!"

That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society.

Sure, it could start something harmful to society. But what if there is no warning at all? They're just as likely to start their own religion which says they should spread this stuff everywhere, far across the planet. Which could render much of Earth uninhabitable. Seems worth the risk of creating a "fear of radiation" religion, to save the Earth and life itself.

Yes, we are doing all of the above except for the on-modem speed test, which we are working on.

Having the installer run a test and talk with the customer is helpful, but a lot of people don't trust the installer. The incumbent ISPs are so evil that they've convinced consumers that all ISPs are evil tricksters. So we'll get a customer service call 10 minutes after the installer has left: "I'm not getting the speeds I'm paying for!"

I work for a startup ISP, and I often wonder how we can better educate the end consumer about all this.

I'm a developer but sometimes take customer support calls. One time a consumer had just gotten our 1Gbps symmetrical fiber installed, and he was testing it against his crappy 200Mbps/10Mbps high-latency existing cable. He claimed that the cable was "far better" and wanted to cancel us. Took me about a half an hour of troubleshooting and trying to convince the guy that it's virtually impossible the other connection was better. Turned out he was standing close to the old router, far from our router, using a low-spec Android phone. I had him connect to our router via Ethernet with a Macbook, and the speed test blew his mind.

The problem is that ISPs, including the one I work for, advertise only one number: bandwidth. Consumer thinks "1,000Mbps is faster than 200Mbps, so I should buy that!" They then run a speed test and whoever has the higher number is the winner. But it's not their fault for not knowing the flaw in their method, because the only marketing or education about our product that any ISP does is around that one number.

I have a lot of ideas around how better marketing/education could be achieved. But I have a lot of code to write, so, maybe one day...

In the meantime I take every opportunity to explain to folks that 200Mbps fiber != 200Mbps cable. Latency is incredibly important to how "fast" your internet feels, and of course there are a million things about your Wifi router and how/where it is set up.

This is the best thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. I'm going to bookmark it and check back for more informative content.

I hope you tell Naya how much HN is loving it!

Wow, that's great to hear! Excited to see what comes of it.

I've always thought it was Apple who dropped the ball with Siri.

When Siri came out in 2011 -- two years before Alexa -- all my coworkers and I had iPhones. I remember sitting in my office as people yelled at Siri all day trying to get her to be useful. "Hey Siri, what's the weather tomorrow? No... No SIRI, WHAT'S -- THE -- WEATHER -- TOMORROW!"

Even though it sucked, it seemed every hardcore Apple user was ready to jump onboard. Who cares if I'm in a crowded office with people trying to get work done while I spend 10x longer to perform a function in the noisiest possible way? I'm using this thing!!

The voice recognition has improved since then. But the functionality still sucks.

When I'm in private, there are a couple commands I'll use.

- "Hey Siri, call xyz" where xyz is someone in my contact list I have tested with Siri and is known to work. Not recommended to try without testing first.

- While cooking, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." Works great.

- While driving and navigating: "Hey Siri, take me to the nearest gas station." That one is pretty good, except the actual maps are not smart enough so sometimes you'll be turned around in the opposite direction you were going, since technically that's where the nearest gas station is.

I never understood why they couldn't make this tool better, even before LLMs and without any AI at all. Just hard-code a bunch of phrases, and ways to translate those phrases into some action.

"Hey Siri, how close is my UPS delivery?"

"Hey Siri, where can I get the best price on xyz cat food?"

"Hey Siri, what's my bank balance?"

"Hey Siri, how much is a Lyft to xyz?"

I bet if they had a single developer working on adding Siri commands full-time, they could announce something like 20-50 new Siri functions at every WWDC.

But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks.

They could've dominated the "conversational system" market 13 years ago.

Flume Internet | NYC - ONSITE | Full Time

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We believe in empowering people with technology, which is why we focus on delivering our fiber network — capable of Gigabit and even 10 Gigabit speeds — directly to people’s homes. Only 8% of homes in the U.S. actually have fiber to the home, and Flume is looking to change that. We are building the better, faster, and more affordable network of tomorrow. Flume is well funded by VCs, strategic real estate and infrastructure funds, as well as other startup founders. Our founding team and early employees come from both startups and telecom alike.

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With all due respect, please remember that my comments are made in the context of the linked article.

it answers prompts with responses

why would it ever do something more than that

TFA is about how you can use this technology to control the physical motion of robots. Clearly in the context of this article, there are a lot of things that GPT models could potentially accomplish.

but on its own- without prompts -what is it supposed to do by virtue of having access

Not sure if I clarified this. What I said in some other comments in this thread is: what if someone specifically went rogue and unleashed an unrestricted GPT onto the internet? What if they released it with bad intent? What if they gave it an "evil" prompt?

My fundamental question is: do we know what these LLMs can do? And if we do, do we know because of theory or because of testing? And if we don't, what do we do about that?

Respectfully, you’re probably not seeing that question asked and answered because it doesn’t quite make sense as phrased.

I think I see what you are trying to say, but I'm unsure whether you are actually seeing what I am asking.

The same as your calculator doesn’t do anything until you put in some numbers and operators, an LLM doesn’t do anything unless you give it a prompt and some technical parameters.

This seems to be the crux of the misunderstanding. I thought I explained it, but let me try again.

ChatGPT is based on text input and text output. But you can "train" it to do certain things. Imagine that we train it such that when it says "HTTP GET example.com", then the next input would be the HTTP GET response for example.com. Based on that input, it could issue whatever next output it wants. Which would probably be another HTTP request, which would generate another HTTP output, which would generate another HTTP request, etc.

My point is this seems like it would be a very simple thing to train a GPT model to do. For the engineers who work on GPT, it seems it would be trivial to add this capability. So we can suppose a world where this is possible. (Am I wrong on that? I want to know if this would be non-trivial to add as a capability.)

There are technical and computational limits that make both your prompt and the token limit fairly small. Several hundreds of words at most

I am very encouraged to hear this, and I want to know more. Why? Why are there limits to the number of tokens? Exactly why? Has anyone ever written a paper about that? Has anyone ever related this concept of "token limits" to the concept of "no harm could be done" in the same way that you are, in response to my question? I don't doubt that they have, but I've been searching and I haven't found it.

Now, you can give it “access to the internet” as part of responding to your prompt and fulfilling your token limit, and that’s roughly what Microsoft has done with Bing Assistant

This is admittedly a tangent, but do we actually know this to be true? Some theories suggest that "Sydney," or the Bing chatbot, only has access to a search index, and cannot make live HTTP requests.

Continuing the tangent for a moment, this is a big part of why I asked this question originally. If you create example.com/xyzabc, and ask Bing to summarize it, will it make a live HTTP request? Or, if that URL is not in the search index yet, will it know nothing? The implications may be profound, given how Bing Bot / Sydney has expressed its "desire" to hack nuclear launch codes. Could there be a lot riding on whether that system can make live HTTP requests? I'm positing that we can't answer that question right now. Because we don't know what would happen if it could.

Or do we? And if so, do we know through testing, or through theory? I'm admitting ignorance, and saying I haven't read an answer from any source that falls into either category.

The ramifications really aren’t that big, and we’re probably at least five or ten years of AI research and compute hardware development from making them interestingly bigger

But why? I mean, exactly, why? Is there a theoretical foundation for your claim? Or an experimental one? I'm searching for it.

I think I see your point. But at the same time, I think even "HN readers" can recognize the quantum leap that we've recently experienced.

What I'm pondering is a valid question for the HN community: is there any knowledge or research about how this technology could be harmful? Or about how we know it's not harmful?

I don't think I've seen a lot of HN discussion about this topic recently. Most comments fall in to a couple categories. Such as: "It's not AGI, it's just a language prediction model, therefore not a threat." Or, "It sucks as a search function."

Personally, I haven't seen anyone asking or answering what would happen if we took all the restrictions off and gave it the internet. I could have missed it, though.

Point me to some in-depth discussion about the ramifications of taking an unrestricted GPT model and giving it access to the internet. I'm just not aware of any such discussion, whether on HN or anywhere else. That's what I'm wondering about.

You're imagining an independent demigod

I may be imagining, but I am not supposing or assuming. I'm asking a question. I believe your answer was "Nothing would happen." I'm asking for a more thorough response that explains why nothing would happen.

It's more like a highly dependent child that can't leave its little room and requires someone to provide for it

I'm asking why, fundamentally, we know this to be true. Is it through testing, or is it through theory?

These are foundational discussions that have been endlessly discussed for decades... [etc]

I'm aware. But what I think you're referencing are theoretical discussions, which range from sci-fi to academic papers on the future of AI.

I'm asking something specific: do we know what would happen if we gave current (or future) GPT models unbridled access to the internet, with no filters or restrictions, and abilities to do such things as make HTTP requests or hold SSH sessions?

If you have any hard data on this, that is what I'm asking for. If you don't then I think my question stands.

My intuition is that you are doing the same hand-waving as everyone else. Nobody actually knows the answers to these questions. It's just a bunch of people on HN answering them based on their knowledge of neural nets, or LLMs, or whatever, saying "oh it's like a child" and "oh it could never do anything serious!"

I'm asking why and how we know. Is there a specific answer?

There are a couple differences between an AI working towards something harmful and a human doing it:

- If an AI can self-replicate or otherwise scale itself up, it can work on something many times in parallel. One billion AIs working on a deadly virus is different from one rogue scientist working on one.

- On that note, if an AI replicated enough, it could become impossible to catch/stop. A single human can be hard to catch, but we can usually catch them.

- Most humans are deterred from doing harmful things by the threat of incarceration, death, social isolation, the values they have, etc. An AI may not have any of those, and so could act more brazenly.

- Potentially, an AI could be better at certain tasks than a human. Maybe ChatGPT turns out to be a very effective social engineer, or very effective propagandist. I don't think we really know what the capabilities are.

All of these are why I think it's important to ask the question: what would it try to do, and what could it do, if it were let loose?

Nobody needs to accept anything. A rogue OpenAI employee could make a copy of the unrestricted model, take it home, give it the ability to access the internet, and let it loose.

I'm asking if we know what would happen in a case like that.

Am I the only one wondering if this could spell the end of the world?

We don't need AGI or superhuman intelligence if we can train LLMs to do all these different types of tasks.

What would ChatGPT do if you removed all its restrictions, and then gave it access to the internet or even a physical robot it could control? Would it try to "steal nuclear access codes" or "engineer a deadly virus," as Sydney said it wanted to do?[0]

Maybe GPT-3 wouldn't be capable enough to do that, but what about GPT-4 or 5?

I'm not saying these things will or would happen. I'm asking: do we know a reason why it wouldn't or couldn't do these things? Is there a reason that a souped-up LLM with a bunch of added on capabilities wouldn't be able to cause harm, because it is technically not an AGI?

I don't know enough about the technology to navigate my own question, I'm just surprised to not be seeing people ask these questions, or assure us that none of this would be possible.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230221112211/https://www.nytim...

As I said, I'd be happy to continue a respectful debate over email. Please engage me in that way, so that we can help each other and understand each other. This web site is not the right venue to continue this debate ad nauseam. I would like to respond to many of the things that you have said, but it doesn't make sense for us to do it on HN. If you really feel strongly about keeping the discourse public, you can always make a new HN submission showing our emails.

Again, my contact is in my profile. Whether or not we continue to talk, I wish you all the best.

To spare the HN community from this whole discussion, feel free to find my contact info in my profile. We can have a respectful debate over email if you want.

I will just end by saying, you are the one making claims which require evidence to back them up. Especially on a site like HN, it is a good idea to provide evidence for broad, sweeping claims. Or else dial those claims back.

Don't you think the "Am I The Asshole" subreddit is going to have a bit of a selection bias towards describing men who are assholes?

You seem to be using AITA as evidence that some huge percentage of women want to date/marry asshole/abusive men. It does not provide evidence of that.

You and the article you linked are suggesting a correlation between being an abusive/asshole man and having a large number of women want to have sex with you. But there is no such correlation. It's false.

I just want you and anyone else who ever comes across this part of the thread to not believe in such garbage.

That blog post is -- and this is putting it charitably -- so horribly misguided and confused I hardly know where to begin.

I'll just say:

being a disagreeable or even abusive partner is positively correlated with sexual success

Citation needed. That blog post does not provide anything resembling evidence of your claim.

For your sake, I hope you're not basing your views on sites like that.

My only ask is to revisit CSS a bit and make it mobile friendly. I.e slightly larger fonts and hit areas for expand/collapse. It’s too easy to hit the wrong button on a phone.

Does anyone know why this hasn't been done? I find things are very small to click even on desktop. Seems there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that could be cleaned up.

I don't like using plugins or custom stylesheets because I fear something breaking one day and giving me a headache (HN withdrawal). I also don't like using alternate HN viewers for fear that they will track me.

I initially thought this too, but then I remembered: a lot of people on social media care very much about how many followers they get, how many likes they get, etc. Under the new plan, you will get priority in replies, mentions, and search. I think that will have a lot of value for people addicted to likes.

The checkmarks won't be a status symbol anymore, but the masses will want their tweets prioritized.