jimmytucson

So the record labels sue the AI companies for copyright infringement and get settlement money and licensing deals in return, then the artists have to sue the record labels for a piece of that new revenue. The labels won't just pay the artists under the CBA, the artists' union has to take them to court to prove the "new use" provision applies.

And meanwhile, slop music is satisfying some of the demand for art, so even if artists do get their slice of the pie, they are not the only bakers anymore.

Seems like programmers whose code was used to train AI coding agents could make an analogous case but I guess much of their code was open source or given up to the models freely?

Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.

I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.

In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.

They have this. It’s called batch pricing and it’s 50% off.

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. That Lucifer sought to make himself lord equal to the king, who was the majesty of God, and for this arrogance God ordered him driven out of heaven with all his host and his company; and this God later created Adam and Eve and people in great number to take the places of the angels who had been expelled. And as this multitude did not follow God's commandments, he sent his Son, whom the Jews seized, and he was crucified.

Even though this sounded nuts to people in Menocchio’s time, it’s not completely implausible. The whole thing about order arising from undifferentiated chaos is pretty Greek, as is the idea of life arising spontaneously from decaying matter (Aristotle believed that). God arising from some preexisting substance is kind of radical but I’m sure there were precursors to that too. The rest of it is almost stock standard Christian mythology.

That “cyclopean” eye is described as a patch of light-sensitive cells.

Fascinating idea. There was another "time-locked" LLM project that popped up on HN recently[1]. Their model output is really polished but the team is trying to figure out how to avoid abuse and misrepresentation of their goals. We think it would be cool to talk to someone from 100+ years ago but haven't seriously considered the many ways in which it would be uncool. Interesting times!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826

You can definitely protect from reassignment in those languages (e.g. `final` in Java) but they don't completely prevent you from changing the underlying data. Rust would be one that comes to mind that has true immutability. I guess the Go maintainers just didn't want to go down that road, which I get.

Not shilling for Go here but there are a few misconceptions in this blog post. In addition to the others mentioned:

All of these examples involve assigning to a constant a value known at compile time but none of them will work

Maps are not known at compile time. Hash functions are randomized based on a seed only known at execution time. The hashed value of "HELLO" is actually different each time the program runs. Even if the hash function weren't random, the runtime has to allocate buckets for map values on the heap, which involves calling the OS to get memory addresses for those buckets, etc.

In Go, `const` means "the compiler can completely evaluate this expression and store the final bytes in the executable," which has the effect of making them non-reassignable, but protection from reassignment is not an actual feature of the language the way it is in Java and C++ (goes back to the maintainers wanting to keep it simple).

Hmm, so in a language that does automatic bounds checking, the compiler might translate a line of source code like:

    let val = arr[i]

    cmp     rdx, rsi        ; Compare i (rdx) with length (rsi)
    jae     .Lpanic_label   ; Jump if i >= length
    ; later...
    .Lpanic_label:
    call    core::panicking::panic_bounds_check

Safe languages insert additional machine branches to do things like verify that array accesses are in-bounds. In correct code, those branches are never taken. That means that the machine code cannot be 100% branch tested, which is an important component of SQLite's quality strategy.

Doesn't the language compiler write the code that checks if the array access is in-bounds? Why would you need to test the compiler's code?

[Learning Zig] is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

Learning LISP, Fortran, APL, Perl, or really any language that is different from what you’re used to, will also do this for you.

Just wanted to say, thanks for doing this! Now the old rant...

I started my career when on-prem was the norm and remember so much trouble. When you have long-lived hardware, eventually, no matter how hard you try, you just start to treat it as a pet and state naturally accumulates. Then, as the hardware starts to be not good enough, you need to upgrade. There's an internal team that presents the "commodity" interface, so you have to pick out your new hardware from their list and get the cost approved (it's a lot harder to just spend a little more and get a little more). Then your projects are delayed by them racking the new hardware and you properly "un-petting" your pets so they can respawn on the new devices, etc.

Anyways, when cloud came along, I was like, yeah we're switching and never going back. Buuut, come to find out that's part of the master plan: it's a no-brainer good deal until you and everyone in your org/company/industry forgets HTF to rack their own hardware, and then it starts to go from no-brainer to brainer. And basically unless you start to pull back and rebuild that muscle, it will go from brainer to no-brainer bad deal. So thanks for building this muscle!

It is just as "vibe-ish" as vector search and notably does require chunking (document chunks are fed to the indexer to build the table of contents). That said, I don't find vector search any less "vibey". While "mathematical similarity" is a structured operation, the "conversion to high-dimensional vectors" part is predicated on the encoder, which can be trained towards any objective.

    > scaling will become problematic as the doc structure approaches the context limit of the LLM doing the retrieval

But yes, still "vibe retrieval".

That’s because every business is “scaled” to the point that the edge employees —- ie the people who interact with paying customers —- don’t own anything, and are 12 levels of management away from anyone who does.

My grandparents owned a grocery store. Their name was on the sign. If you brought home spoiled meat, that was their name and you as a member of their community that were put out.

When my mom brings home spoiled meat from Stop & Shop, she goes back there not just to exchange it, but to complain to someone about how it messed up her barbecue plans, etc. And I’m like seriously, why would anyone working at Stop & Shop give a rat’s ass about your family gathering? Stop & Shop is owned by a Dutch multinational “food retail” company.

But that’s not the capitalism she grew up with. She actually thinks capitalism is great because it allowed her parents to come over on a boat as teenagers and make lives for themselves, and have extra to send back home. But she hates it when she calls her cable company and ends up chatting with a girl in Singapore. Go figure.

The company with the lowest median pay, Aptiv, I had to look up, and what a darling of a company this is:

    - guilty of systemic accounting fraud from 1999-2004
    - manufactured a (allegedly known-to-be) faulty ignition switch that led to the deaths of 124 people and injured 275 others
    - currently forcing 20,000 former employees to fight a decades-long legal battle for their earned pension benefits
    - gleefully dumps massive quantities of carcinogens and poisons into the environment, including: lead compounds, chromium compounds, sulfuric and hydrochloride acid (lol), and glycol ethers

Citations here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv

That’s why we use a tree structure rather than just a flat list of sections. This is what makes it different from traditional RAG

Ah ok, that’s a key piece I was missing. That’s really cool, thanks!

So if I understand this correctly, this works on a single large document whose size exceeds what you can or want to put into a single context frame for answering a question? It first "indexes" the document by feeding successive "proto-chunks" to an LLM, along with an accumulator, which is like a running table of contents into the document with "sections" that the indexer LLM decides on and summarizes, until the table of contents is complete. (What we're calling "sections" here - these are still "chunks", they're just not a fixed size and are decided on by the indexer at build time?)

Then for the retrieval stage, it presents the table of contents to a "retriever" LLM, which decides which sections are relevant to the question based on the summaries the indexer LLM created. Then for the answer generation stage, it just presents those relevant sections along with the question.

That's pretty clever - does it work with a corpus of documents as well, or just a single large document? Does the "indexer" know the question ahead of time, or is the creation of sections and section summarization supposed to be question-agnostic? What if your table of contents gets too big? Seems like then it just becomes normal RAG, where you have to store the summaries and document-chunk pointers in some vector or lexical database?

To save you a click, 19% is actually not a lot (I thought it was):

19% of California houses were owned by investors, ranking No. 36 among the states and just below the 20% national norm.

States with the highest share of investor-owned houses:

Hawaii at 40%, Alaska at 35%, Vermont at 31%, West Virginia at 30%, and Wyoming at 30%.

States with the lowest are all in the Mid-Atlantic and lower New England:

Connecticut at 10%, Rhode Island and Massachusetts at 12%, and Delaware at 13%.

Why so low in California (again, I'm baffled that this is "low")?

the sky-high price tag for single-family homes, the third-highest nationally at $866,100

Pretty amazing this all started as MLB Advanced Media more than 20 years ago streaming baseball games on the internet before YouTube existed! When I joined, they were streaming NHL, MLS, WWE, HBO, and many others. Then they spun off and sold to Disney and became Disney+. I wonder if any lines of code from those very early days still get executed.

Regardless, this is terrible for sports fans. Disney will chop this up into “baskets” with one watchable thing padded with lots of other unwatchable-to-mildly-interesting stuff (college hockey from a single camera angle anyone?). Then, when you want to watch some event, you’ll open your ESPN Premium +- whatever app, get excited when you see the event on the home screen, only to be upsold to start your free trial of ESPN NFL++ Hulu Fans Only Bundle. The only solution is to boycott the whole damn thing, which is what I am doing, and I love having the extra cash for tickets to local minor league games, etc.

Why not do it before you need a job? While you're comfortable, submit your application for open roles and reject the AI interviewer.

The system’s brightness decreases when the companion star swings around behind Betelgeuse. It also dips when Betelgeuse goes behind the companion star but much less so because Betelgeuse is so much larger.

Don’t look at the concrete tiles in the foreground. Focus on the background. The world moves.

Awesome and terrible. I keep scrubbing back and forth and seeing new things.

Ad free (for now): https://www.reddit.com/answers/D0BEF0B5-803A-4FD1-BCF4-DC358...

Reminds me of the scene in Blood Meridian where they find a dog in an abandoned Apache camp and Brown says, “you won’t man that thing,” and Captain Glanton says, “I can man anything that eats.”

Worked for Dun & Bradstreet for a bit in high school. Weird job, looking back. Sitting in a cubicle, a terminal would "randomly" pull up information about a small business in a kinda CRUD-like interface that a 14-year-old could spin up in a few minutes in RoR. You'd have to cold-call the business owner, and then ask all sorts of personal questions, like their address, how many customers they have. My "favorite" question, "What was your total revenue last year?" And some people would actually give it out! But most would spit in your face or hang up. The coup de grace was if they didn't hang up, you had to then upsell them on one of your data products. I remember one of them was just, here's the information we have on you (that you just gave me).

It was soooo soul-crushing, after every call I'd click away from the CRUD terminal to a browser and read a little "John Baez's stuff" for a few minutes. And then I'd hear the phone ring and it'd be my boss saying, "Let's take another call, okay?"

They used to tell us Abraham Lincoln worked there, I guess because it's hard to imagine Abe toiling at a fucking boring and embarrassing job like this, so maybe it's actually not that bad.

Do feed and ranking algorithms have "sub-rational" influence over people's thoughts and opinions? If feeds are mind control, shouldn't courts and lawmakers just ban mind control? I'm glad we're taking it out of the hands of a foreign government, but why put it in the hands of domestic tech companies?

It wasn't just the stimulus checks, it was also the increase in income from job hopping, seeing my 401k and brokerage accounts explode, etc. I'm not saying it was rational or that stimulus checks weren't a good idea, I'm just reflecting on my own personal psychology. Not surprised it doesn't match everyone's!

Oh, I definitely did invest some of it (if you can call playing with cash in a brokerage account investing), and seeing some of the returns I got made me feel even richer.

I should stress that I am not a totally rational or irrational actor, I'm pretty much average intelligence, and this is one person's anecdote.

Because Google's search results are so good, it's possible (and maybe even common nowadays) to use Google's rank(someQuery, someDocument) as a relevance label to train your own ranker on, but what Google alleged here is even more interesting: they claim Microsoft used IE to telemetrize users' Google searches, scraping the query and results -- `(someQuery, [document1, document2, ...])` -- phoning that home, and using that _directly as their IR_, presumably by caching it or something. Kind of a cheeky move by Bing!

Edit: Just checked and Chrome wasn't the dominant web browser until mid-2012 or so[0], so IE definitely would have seen a big enough share of Google searches to make this viable. I wonder if this factored into Google's strategy for Chrome and monopolizing search, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

Anecdotal but my spending habits changed a lot during lockdown and it's been an uphill battle to get them back to normal.

There was a period there where we were flush with valuable cash that you wanted to just spend, just for the dopamine hit in some cases, but also because you knew the cash was going to be worth less over time. Getting stimulus checks was a bit of a mindfuck too. We still shop almost exclusively on our phones, and it's so easy to just "add to cart" and have someone put it in my trunk or drop it at my doorstep.

Cut to a few years later and the cost of things has risen faster than my income and my brain is still "COVID rich", I can see why credit card balances are higher and defaults are more common.