captainmuon

Most AI alarmism benefits big tech itself. Either they want to create awe and thus demand for their products (see the recent dance around Mythos), or they want to create regulatory capture and increase the moat around AI.

Interestingly , we as a species already created an overreaching "cybernetic" system that controls our global society and that the individual is powerless against - it is not AI, but capitalism. Thus the current danger is not that AI becomes superintelligent and enslaves us, not that it makes a regime ultra-powerful, but that it increases economic inequality and concentrates economic power in the hands of even fewer people.

The irony is that new technology could allow us to live a life of abundance and leisure, but instead people are laid off, made unable to participate in the economy, etc.. The technology is (as so often) chafing against the bounds of society. I sometimes wonder what the superintelligent AI would say about this, and if it would come up with a completely novel political theory - "silly humans, why don't you just organise your affairs like this, you'd be much happier, and we could coexist much better: ...".

Beijing is a bad example, because all of China actually has Beijing time. It gets confusing in Xinjang, which is 2 hours in the "wrong" timezone. But that doesn't mean that people start work at 8:00 in complete darkness, they just start at 10:00 wall time.

I think the talk of daylight savings time is a distraction, in the end it is arbitrary what the clock says. As a society we need to negotiate when (in celestial time) we want to do certain activities. For example, there are a lot of studies that school starts to early (relative to sunrise and the average bed time of teenagers). But the school starting time has to be decided politically. And reduced working hours or later start times have to be negotiated by trade unions, politics etc.. That's a lot more messy than just shifting wall time.

Isn't the problem that role tags are just part of the input stream? So a specific word in the system prompt becomes the same token as the same word in the user prompt? A clean way to solve this would be to map system prompts to a distinct set of tokens from the ones in user prompts. This would require twice as many possible tokens, so it is probably not feasible. But maybe you could add "color" to the input stream by changing one input variable depending on whether the current token is part of the system prompt or not? Just like humans take different voices into account and not just the context of the text.

I have to say I am not very familiar with implementation details of language models, and maybe this is already done?

I don't get how so many people say pressing red is the right choice. Yes, if everyone presses red then nobody dies, but the same is true if everyone presses blue. But if almost everyone presses red, a lot of people die, and if almost everyone presses blue still nothing happens.

It would be funny if nobody dies but this was just a test if you are capable of large scale coordination - and everybody who presses red just looses their vote in society.

JavaScript got async in 2017, Python in 2015, and C# in 2012. Python actually had a version of it in 2008 with Twisted's @inlineCallbacks decorator - you used yield instead of await, but the semantics were basically the same.

I don't understand that point. Why do e-bikes become better or more safe when you have to rotate your legs? Its really frustrating and silly that I have to go through the motions (literally) of riding a bicycle if I want to get the priviledge of using a bike lane or going without a license plate. (At least that's the case here in Germany AFAIK).

They could go ahead and make "fast electric bikes" and "slow electric bikes" or something as categories and that would make sense - but hinging the decision on whether your legs or your wrist is turning is illogical. I think it is actually morally charged - like you have to put in the work if you want the privilege.

It's like the invention of the power loom, but for knowledge workers. Might be interesting to look at the history of industrialisation and the reactions to it.

I guess technically you are right, in that NAT doesn't prevent connections, it enables connections. But in the situation where you would have a NAT, behind a residential router, an outside host cannot connect to an arbitrary host on my internal network.

On a publicly routed PC, I can call `listen` and an outside host can connect to me.

On a PC behind a NAT - if I don't set up port forwarding - I can call `listen` and nobody from outside can connect to me.

So one could say, going from publicy routed to behind a NAT means that only allowed incoming connections are possible. Or am I missing something and you can really, from the outside, open a connection to a PC on a residential network which is behind a simple NAT (TCP server listening on that PC)?

Nooo... I don't want something to exist that can absolutely prove that a photo is real. This only serves to enforce social norms more rigidly. These include reasonable norms like against committing crimes or behaving abusingly but it also includes stupid norms like behaving uncool or doing something embarrasing. The problem is, where do you draw the line? I think if somebody does something stupid or even morally dubious there should always be a way of forgetting it.

That you can't believe everything you see in the age of AI is a feature, not a bug. We are so used to photographs being hard facts that we'll have to go through a hard transition, but we'll be fine afterwards, just as we were before the invention of photography. Our norms will adapt. And photographs will become mere heresay and illustration, but that's OK.

I think here the same dynamic is at play as with music/videos and DRM. Our society is so used to doing it the old way - selling physical records - that when new technology comes along, which allows free copying, we can't go where the technology leads us (because we don't know how to feed the artists, and because the record industry has too much power), so we invent a mechanism to turn back the wheel and make music into a scarce good again. Similar here: we can't ban Photoshop and AI, but we invent a technology to try to turn back time and make photos "evidence" again.

LLMs are just the speech center part of the brain, not a whole brain. It's like when you are speaking on autopilot, or reciting something by heart, it just comes out. There is no reflection or inner thought process. Now thinking models do actually do a bit of inner monologue before showing you the output so they have this problem to a much lesser degree.

this just hasn't been the case for some time now

Which I find sad actually. The idea of C++ as a superset of C is really powerful, especially when mixing C and C++. A while ago I had a C project (firmware for a microcontroller) and wanted to bake the version and the compilation time into the firmware. I didn't find a way to do this in plain C, but in C++ you can initialize a global struct and it gets statically linked into the output. This didn't even use constexpr, just preprocessor trickery. Then it was just a matter of renaming the c file to cpp and recompiling. I guess you could also do that with C, but there are things like RAII or constexpr or consuming a C++ library that you can't do without.

Cellebrite admits they can not hack GrapheneOS if users had installed updates since late 2022.

So, how do I know that GrapheneOS is not a honeypot for the really big fish?

At this point it seems if you really want to be safe, you have to add obscurity (in addition to conventional best practices). Like changing the pinout on your USB port so the exploit device can't connect.

Or 3) there are illegal immigrants and ICE is deporting them according to the law, BUT some people think this is unjust and want to do something against it. The democratic process to change laws is too slow or doesn't work properly, or there is no majority to change the law.

Remember there is a difference between legal and legitimate. You don't have to do something just because it is the law (well, you could define "have to" to mean what the law says, but then it becomes pretty circular).

Historically, often behavior changes before the applicable laws change. Think about the acceptance of gay relationships, or the use of cannabis. If people don't sometimes break the law, society can't evolve. That doesn't mean the rule of law has to break down. I think the rule of law is very important and would uphold it in most cases, but there are certain cases where conscience might order one to break or circumvent a law.

I think users applies to end-users here. So you must not run the software as a service (either paid or for free) for other users. You are free to use it yourself.

Crucially, I think what is banned to offer accounts. Offering turnkey-hosting is probably banned in spirit, but the person offering the turnkey-hosting is not in violation, rather the person booking the turnkey hosting and offering the accounts on the instance to third parties is in violation.

I think the wording is originally against somebody like Amazon hosting e.g. database instances for other people to use, and then giving you an account in that database. It's still OK to rent a VM from them and use the package manager to install it.

In any way, it is really confusing, in a way a license should not be. And I don't really understand why someone builds a blog platform, which is not monetized, open sources it, but doesn't want other people to host it. If I open source my stuff, I want people to use it. If I want to share the code but don't want people to use it I'd just put it somewhere it with no license at all (all rights reserved).

So, as there are a couple of docks coming out that work with Switch 2 and have apparently reverse engineered the protocol... I wonder if some company could make a small dongle that just sits between the switch and my monitor, or my USB-C docking station, and fixes the communication.

For a DIY solution, protocol wise it doesn't seem too complicated, but electronically USB-C or HDMI is out of reach for most hobbyists. And I assume most USB-C interface chips you can get aren't programmable to the degree neccessary...

No, please do invent your own crypto, just don't deploy it! Coming up with schemes and then seeing where they fail is the best way to learn the intricacies. I think more of us 'lowly developers' should be familiar with the common pitfalls.

That the bank is aware of your identity is not neccessarily a flaw, but a boundary condition of the protocol. Assuming a trusted intermediary, how can we.... I think a solution here is not purely technical, but also social. How about establishing a trusted intermediary that can check your identity, but for sure does not do anything malicious with the information? Maybe there is a strong taboo against disclosing the information, like with the confidentiality of confession.

There is another flaw in the proposed scheme, how do you make sure that people don't just take the signature from another person? This one is pretty tricky to solve.

I have been thinking about similar "proof of attribute" protocols for a while, since they have interesting use cases outside of age verification. You could verify that a person on HN is really an Apple employee, without Apple being able to identify that user. Or on a dating site, you could verify that the user is a certain gender, in a certain age bracket, and the account is tied to a social media account in good standing (not a throwaway account), without having the link explicit somewhere (and thus leakable).

Back when I was studying physics, we frequently had to do calculations with error propagation. I tried to implement something very similar in C++ and in Python, but never finished it. I also thought it would be neat if a spreadsheet program could understand uncertainties, and also units, so you could enter 1m +- 10cm and it would propagate the errors correctly. If you laid out the data with one column for the values and one for the errors, I had a couple of OpenOffice macros that would perform the calculations.

Another place where I think this would be neat would be in CAD. Imagine if you are trying to create a model of an existing workpiece or of a room, and your measurements don't exactly add up. It's really frustrating and you have to go back and measure again, and you usually end up idealizing the model and putting in rounder numbers to make it fit, but it is less true to reality. It would be cool if you could put in uncertainties for all lengths and angles, and it would run a solver to minimize the total error.

Their business model might be dead, I don't know. But the latest Prusa printers are as far as I know not really open - I can't download the schematics for free and make a clone, can I? And also a truely open schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it. Granted, commercial development with open core might be in trouble.

But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.

Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.

I work at a university data center, although not on LLMs. We host state of the art models for a large number of users. As far as I understand, there is no secret sauce. We just have a big GPU cluster with a batch system, where we spin up jobs to run certain models. The tricky part for us is to have the various models available on demand with no waiting time.

But I also have to say 700M weekly users could mean 100M daily or 70k a minute (low ball estimate with no returning users...) is a lot, but achievable at startup scale. I don't have out current numbers but we are several orders of magnitude smaller of course :-)

The big difference to home use is the amount of VRAM. Large VRAM GPUs such as H100 are gated being support contracts and cost 20k. Theoretically you could buy a Mac Pro with a ton of RAM as an individual if you wanted to run auch models yourself.

The reason you are using C++ in the first place is because you care about details like allocation, so to me this is a gigantic fumble.

I wouldn't say that applies to everybody. I use C++ because it interfaces with the system libraries on every platform, because it has class-based inheritance (like Java and C#, unlike Rust and Zig) and because it compiles to native code without an external runtime. I don't care to much about allocations.

For me the biggest fumble is that C++ provides the async framework, but no actual async stdlib (file io and networking). It took a while for options to be available, and while eg Asio works nicely it is crazily over engineered in places.

We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.

It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.

About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).

I don't know, Sandbox escape from a browser is a big deal, a million dollars bounty kind of deal. I feel safe to put an automated browser in a container or a VM and let it run with a timeout.

And if a site pulls something like that on me, then I just don't take their data. Joke is on them, soon if something is not visible to AI it will not 'exist', like it is now when you are delisted from Google.

As somebody who does some scraping / crawling for legitimate uses, I'm really unhappy with this development. I understand people have valid cases why they don't want their content scraped. Maybe they want to sell it - I can understand that, although I don't like it. Maybe they are opposed to it for fundamental reasons. I for one would like my content to be spread maximally. I want my arguments to be incorporated into AIs, so I can reach more people. But of course that is just me when I'd write certain content, others have different goals.

It gets annoying when you have the right to scrape something - either because the owner of the data gave you the OK or because it is openly licensed. But then the webmaster can't be bothered to relax the rate limiter for you, and nobody can give you a nice API. Now people are putting their Open Educational Resources, their open source software, even their freaking essays about openness that they want the world to read behind Anubis. It makes me shake my head.

I understand perfectly it is annoying when badly written bots hammer your site. But maybe then HTTP and those bots are the problem. Maybe we should make it easier for site owners to push their content somewhere where we can scrape it easier?

I feel like most people only use Tor via the Tor browser or a socks proxy, and the developers in the ecosystem cater only to these users. But there are a bunch of other creative uses of Tor around.

A couple of years ago, I used the TransPort feature of Tor combined with an iptables rule to redirect certain applications over Tor, like a web browser. The goal was a poor man's VPN. Access some websites without your local network admin to know about it, and without the website to know who you are. Back then there was Java applets and Flash, and this worked to hide network requests from them, too, as opposed to other solutions. Later iptables removed the feature that allowed you to filter on PID and broke my workflow. I changed it to use a dedicated unix user for tor, but that broke at some point, too, and I just got a commercial VPN.

Tor discouraged my use case, and I guess if you are afraid of being tracked or recognized as a returning user, then you should stick to Tor browser. But everybody has their own use cases.

It's funny that the list includes both California and the US.

It would be interesting to compare economies of the same scale, regardless of legal status: If you are considering the US and China, maybe you should include the whole of the EU. And if you are looking at Germany, Japan, ... It makes sense to not only include California, but also to split up other countries. I'm curious how high up Guandong or Shanghai would be for example.

The fact that the US and China show up as single countries (and not "continents"/regions) whereas the EU shows up as a bunch of "small" countries is source of a lot of inferiority complex in Europe.

Except pixels are little squares. Sure, if you look under a microscope, they have funny shapes, but they are always laid out in a rectangular grid. I've never seen any system where the logical pixels are staggered like a hex grid, for example. No matter how the actual light emitters are arranged, the abstraction offered to the programmer is a rectangular grid.

If you light up pixels in a row, you get a line - a long thin rectangle - and not a chain of blobs. If you light them up diagnoally, you get a jagged line. For me that is proof that they squares - at least close enough to squares. Heck even on old displays that don't have a square pixel ratio they are squished squares ;-). And you have to treat them like little squares if you want to understand antialiasing, or why you sometimes have to add (0.5, 0.5) to get sharp lines.

(And a counterpoint: The signal-theoretical view that they are point samples is useful if you want to understand the role of gamma in anti-aliasing, or if you want to do things like superresolution with RGB-sub-pixels.)

I would go further, it should not be (just) forbidden, but taboo. Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.

If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.

I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.

That's great if you are the kind of person wo is added into fun social group chats. But my group chats are mostly functional, like for hobbies, or parents groups for the kids' classes, and so on. There is one family group which sees annoying memes every now and then, and one group with friends from university which is also rarely used.

Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.

It's not about the Apache web server, and I know there are a lot of actively maintained and respected projects under the Apache label (Lucene, Tomcat, Maven, ...).

I think the project that gave the most sour association was OpenOffice, which was donated to Apache when it was already over and the LibreOffice fork was well underway, and it has been on life support ever since. I recall there were a couple other projects with a similar fate but to be honest it is probably more of a brand reputation thing than an assessment of the quality of every project.