jacobn

Make a billion / deserve a billion. Ok.

Given how tech has gone from nerdy underdog to Orwellian, Machiavellian, dopamine-peddling overlord, I’m actually a bit surprised people aren’t more angry / upset.

Over the last 40 years there has been two career paths with “disproportionate leverage”: tech and finance.

I believe in capitalism, contracts and the rule of law. A founder starting a company and attracting capital, employees and customers and generating tremendous wealth I see as an opportunity, not a bug.

But if I were in a normal career the wealth generated by tech & finance would certainly look & feel like some form of cheat code.

The last forty years have been a huge transient. Massive. AI will probably push it even further.

I hope we as a society and democracy can survive the strain.

So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?

(That can of course change very quickly, yes)

Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...

I just ask it for what I’m looking for (doing very simple “spare part” level at home 3d printing, nothing fancy or elaborate) and it gives me a starting point. Then I sometimes just edit the scad code by hand, and some times I ask the AI to revise, sometimes a mix (many iterations).

For very simple geometries it works great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a disconnect between “LLM views image” and “LLM emits scad that looks like that image” when it comes to anything non-trivial.

Still gives me a starting point I can mess with, which is great since I have zero CAD training or experience.

(I’m not the commenter you replied to)

I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

And https://www.x402.org/

MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.

Are there any nuclear alternatives that don't include strapping low grade bombs to the reactor core (PRW/BWR: water separation -> hydrogen + oxygen -> boom, like happened @ Fukushima) or using coolants that instantly start violently combusting when exposed to air or moisture (sodium)?

I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem so bad? Are there really no better options?

Cool! How do you actually implement “Reverse-mode automatic differentiation with a tape-based computational graph” in rust?

Most web request cases where you care about performance probably have multiple parallel web requests, so there’s no clean separation possible?

Don't the models typically train on their input too? I.e. submitting the question also carries a risk/chance of it getting picked up?

I guess they get such a large input of queries that they can only realistically check and therefore use a small fraction? Though maybe they've come up with some clever trick to make use of it anyway?

If there’s an issue with the core then the salt tank can act as a heat sink in a way a battery can’t?

The boiling / pressure water reactors all have requirements on active cooling being maintained in emergencies - I’m not familiar with this design nor to what extent the salt is intended to fulfill such a function, but it’s plausible that it could buffer things for idk 1h-3d maybe?

The holy grail is the “walk away safe” reactor, I would hope / presume all the novel / modern ones fulfill that?

Isn't that how most web standards got their start? One of the interested parties pushed something, then things evolved through the standards process?

(And then it can of course get derailed, but that's a separate story)

Isn’t it more of an “all of the above”?

A lot of employees at successful startups & FAANG make most of their money from the stock, no? And they need to buy houses and send their kids to fancy schools too, no? So sure, we can reduce it to stock holders, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the 90% of employees who aren’t posting on hn are at least passively ok with “improving metrics”, and some ambitious ones are driving the enshittification initiatives hard.

The animation on the page looks an awful lot like autoregressive inference in that virtually all of the tokens are predicted in order? But I guess it doesn't have to do that in the general case?

Scientists long thought that tiny turtles drifted passively with ocean currents, literally going with the flow.

"What we've uncovered is that the turtles are actually swimming,"

the trick was developing flexible solar-powered tags that could hang onto shells long enough to send back data.

Eventually the GPS tags slough off because "the outside of a young turtle's shell sheds as they grow very quickly,"

This, plus the A/B testing of headlines to maximize clicks has lead inexorably to the current information environment.

Our intuitions, outrage, and knee-jerk reactions are being weaponized to gain clicks, votes, donations, and "action".

Many a dictatorship has fallen in the wake of social media revolutions. I wonder how long democracy can last?

In a would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-tragic ironic twist both of the two main US parties see themselves as the last guardians of democracy and frame their opponents as Evil, against which "any means necessary" is the only reasonable course of action.

(Yes, the party you disagree with is way worse and it's all their fault, this whataboutism indeed has to end, absolutely)

And here we all are.

After this article was published, a USDA spokesperson said Fong left the office Monday on her own accord.

"She was accompanied by two friends who she paused to take selfies with on her way out. Security officials did not play any role in her departure,” the spokesperson said.

Great work, very interesting list!

Ideally the "% Limit" column would: 1. Be right-aligned 2. Have consistent formatting (i.e. same number of digits after the dot) 3. A little bar underneath each number showing relative scale (i.e. top entry is full width, last entry is 216.7 / 32571.4 = 0.00665307601, though maybe on a log scale for confusion? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs_(progra...

??! Is converted to |

So ??!??! Becomes || i.e. “or”

https://xkcd.com/327/

Cool project! When is the next hike of the property?

Would they need to be blocked completely? Maybe a much thinner shielding would still produce a significant benefit?

(Though likely not of course ;)

Jepsen test?

Is this a dataset issue more than an LLM issue?

As in: do we just need to add 1M examples where the response is to ask for clarification / more info?

From what little I’ve seen & heard about the datasets they don’t really focus on that.

(Though enough smart people & $$$ have been thrown at this to make me suspect it’s not the data ;)

So a lot of Apple Intelligence is still vaporware then?

From [1] "Additional Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following", i.e. later in 2024 and then in 2025, and the not-available-at-launch features appear to be the stronger ones, e.g. ChatGPT integration?

Any word on improving the dictate-to-text keyboard feature? I could only find "In the Notes and Phone apps, users can also record, transcribe, and summarize audio", but that's different.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...

The fact that they have touch id on some of the ipad side power buttons, but not on the iphone, is so annoying. Face id is both great and terrible, and complementing it with touch id to cover the >5% of cases where face id fails would be such an improvement.

The only number I could find was 22/27 hours of video playback for 16/16 Pro, you can compare that to older models on https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/ that might give some indication?

Nice work! Making AI accessible directly in the browser (even if you have to download quite the payload for the model parameters) is a real accessibility game changer.

Shameless plug: if you prefer API-based background removal we offer a super low cost, high quality option on https://pixian.ai

I was under the impression that you could more or less do something like that with the existing LLMs?

(May work poorly of course, and the sample I think I saw a year ago may well be cherry picked)