phtrivier

""satire" is just a first draft with bad timing."

I'm stealing this one.

Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.

Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?

Don't know if it's off topic, ad hominem, or whatnot : but this substack is an almost comical example of a "one-post-poney".

The author is VERY much a fan of phytoplankton fertilization. He does not cite many other people talking about it, but he is very very very convinced.

Maybe he's right, but the tone and the "once you have a hammer, everything look like deep ocean fertilization" bit does not help.

That actually seems great ! My understanding is that it has to wrap ASDF package, so is there a risk of trying to find a well known lib, but not finding it because the authors refuse to create a ocicl package for some complex political reason (or sheer lazyness ?)

- a single, canonical, sanctified toolchain for "all the things that are require but don't matter"

What's the "cargo xxx" of lisp ? It depends. Maybe it's "quicklisp something". Maybe it's "ASDF something". Maybe it's a mixture of three different things and you ask a dumb question on SO that should be in the first page of the manual, and you get 10k views : https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/83200/given-a-bran...

I know, you enjoy the power of having options, configuring everything, and shaving your yaks to the bone with macros over macros.

But I suspect you never hear of so many questions about "retro antagonist polymorphic macros over monadic functional arrowd", because people give up at "how do I import a lib to make an http call" ?

- a single, standard and opinionated way to lay your frigging files on your effing disk. "cargo new". And, no, it should NOT require people to create a top level "common-lisp" folder to store all their projects.

- adding and loading deps. Sorry, typing quicklisp:xxxx in every repl session you open is not "cargo add".

- a baked in way to run some sort of unit test suite. Have dozens of options if you want, but what is the "cargo test" ?

Of course all those problems have been solved by various tools somewhere in 1997, so it will sound like an "entitled millennial" comment.

But, soon, the tagline to aim for will be "a lisp for the 100 years of lisp". What's that ?

From my experience, to be happy I would need the perf of sbcl, the syntax, litterals and data structure of clojure, the begginer-friendlyness of drracket, the type system of ocaml, and the dev experience of rust.

Does that exist somewhere ? I hope jank gets there. Or maybe roc will.

At this point, given the progress and expectations of using LLM, writing code is going to be purely a hobby concern, like carving wood furniture became a hobby once you have Ikea.

So we might as well use fun tools :)

To be honest I suspect the tech has been available here too, but the marketing is just confusing. But again, "cooling your house to survive summer" is, for real, a pretty recent concern to have in Europe, as opposed to "heating and insulating your house to survive winter".

It's almost as if the climate is warming in accordance to what physicist have been saying for 30 years.

"Qui aurait pu prévoir ?", as the other one would have said (sorry for the franco-french reference. And I know we'll "regret" the guy next year...)

because a heat pump is just an "evil" AC running in reverse

I keep hearing that, and then I keep hearing people tell me that you can't just put an heat pump, run it in "reverse" and "pretend" to have AC. That seems to be a case where the theory is here, but in practice the applicances are just optimized for one part, or the other.

(Also, heating is often done by heating water in radiators, and cooling by cooling the air.

It may seems stupid, but I still can fathom whether the same applicance can do both ! Or, if I want to do the right thing, and replace both my no-very-old gas boiler AND my pretty-old AC, can I put a single heat pump ?)

Air Conditioning. Aka "La clim'" in France.

For some context: the conversation about climate change in general, and the recent heatwaves in particular, has been (quite cynically, but cleverly) reframed by far-right parties to be all about "we need to put AC in France to survive heatwaves".

This is smart because it addresses on the physical sensations of people (it's the third heatwave since end of may, and counting), it has an element of truth (AC is critically lacking in schools), it seems much more "down to earth" than the grand plans of "decarbonization", and it makes other political parties look out of touch (the left and greens have been criticizing AC because of the energy impact.)

Of course, this is both "smart" and incredibly cynical, given that the far right has been on the edge (or not so much on the edge) of climate denial for years. So year, "climate changes is not real" turned into "why didn't they put AC everywhere ?" then "vote for us, we'll put AC everywhere !"

This is also very short sighted.

But I guess no one has found a way to ask our future president (Marine Le Pen, twice convicted of embezzlement, waiting to know if she will have to run for President with a "jail from home" tracker, etc...) what exact amount of "putting AC and kicking immigrants out" is going to avoid Fontainebleau forest from burning.

(Also, since those people are incredibly "lucky", I can only imagine what will happen if we learn that the fire was volontary, and the arsonist was an immigrant... )

The only "consolation" is that El Nino is coming back, and she takes office on the 15th of may, so _she_ will have to deal with at least a couple heatwaves between 2027 and 2037...

Yup, we can dream bigger and give bigger dreams :)

A silver lining in the tech progress is this : I remember watching movies from the 60s or the 70s, in the 90s, and feeling "damn, that looks old". I could only care about movies made after 1984, or something (and, men, did amblin and the "produced by Steven Spielberg-verse" give us good things to watch.)

I suspect that, now that movies are kinda "converging" in terms of visual, it will be easier to share the movies of our childhoods with the next generation.

Besides, they don't care that much about looks : I litteraly witnessed 10 year old kids getting hooked on my 1991 game boy !!!!

Here's to "trying to be someone's childhood heroes"

Hi ! The "artistic direction" is a bit original, but that's your thing, and you're free to present it anyway you want, of course !

I think the biggest problem people / I had when reading the list was the "based on a rumoured list of papers that Ilya Sutskever gave to John Carmack."

Where did you get the "rumoured list" from ? Why should a reader trust the rumours ? That seems to be a pretty big appeal to authority, and it's okay if it's only "word of mouth" (as most papers seems legit), but it's really weird not to give a source, or a backstory, or references, etc...

Especially since you claim to only have 27 ;)

So, ChatControl 1.0 (the volontary, limited one that expired and is being revived) has been active for about 2 years now.

Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.

But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?

Yeah, sales take part in the blame game too, otherwise they would miss on the fun. I don't see many salesperson quit their job to become carpenters, though, so maybe the huge paychecks help. Go figure.

That being said, engineers usually don't complain about being asked for the status of the feature.

What we complain about is being asked why the feature we never committed to deliver is still not there yet.

Even worse if we get cornered into uttering words that are then ret-conned into a commitment.

(A very "efficient" techniques I've heard of if for salesperson to "ask the same question over and over again with enough variations until the engineer and PMs cave." May be helpful if you have already decided to answer "yes" to the feature request / RFP checkbox anyway. Doesn't end well for most people, but sometime a quota gotta be quota-ed....)

This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)

What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)

Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")

Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")

More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?

What is the reference, unbiased, honest, reputable and trustworthy site that ranks and compare models on the couple of realistic metrics that matters ? ("Does it work for code", "no, I mean, for real", "how much does it cost", etc...) ?

Sorry if it's a meta post, or a faq, or if I'm just missing some HN lore here, but I finally have to ask : why is it that, everytime there's a new release for OpenTTD (and 0ad, for that matters), it makes it to the front page ?

I can kinda get why there are often news about Factorio, for example (it's not subtly related to programming), and there is nothing wrong with open source projects getting visibily even when they're not "yet another web framework" or "the last open weight LLM wrapper".

But why those games in particular ? Are the authors regulars of HN ? Is there an interesting forking history / backstory ?

Any way, kudos for the release, of course :)

My post should have used quotes around "AI and blockchain" (or maybe read "AI and blockain and VR and whatever").

By that I meant "they don't pretend they're going to solve a hard problem by vaguely handwaving at trendy buzzwords".

More seriously speaking, I suspect (and hope) that some form of machine learning / data generation could help in such an effort (AlphaFold is a thing, not a buzzword.)

The blockchain part is much more tongue in check, of course.

No idea of whether those people ar competent, or if it's a PR stunt. Good luck to them. I've joked often enough that "a vaccine for common cold" would have changed my life.

Also, I'm:

- happy that they don't claim the breakthrough will come from AI or Blockchain, for once

- a bit surprised that they got founding by both openAi and Anthropic (so of course they'll try to solve a few things with ai and Blockchain, but,who knows.) Aren't those companies loosing vast amount of money at the moment ? What are they doing philanthropy with ? Just borrowing ? Or are investors for their Series XYZ usually ok with the owner using the money to fund pet projects (even if here, the "pet project" is a good idea, and potentially a good customer/ ?

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

The building is not burned down. Not making everything worst all the time has to be the first step. Second derivatives, and all that. No reason to pop the Champaign on time square for everyone ; but all the scientists working on this can take a good, deep breath of relief. And the republican senators who broke rank need to be nagged in breaking ranks on other topics. (Don't get me wrong, they do it purely for electoral purpose - but that's a feature of representative democracy, not a bug.)

I'm one of the few who absolutely believe they're not one of the rare "good" - hopefully, "not yet".

What resources do you recommend to improve ?

The boats are still being built, but Vela said it hopes to have five trimarans operating by 2030 to meet its once-a-week shipment goal.

Why is it always like this ?

"Slight improvement to be delivered in beta in a 5 years for limited users at premium prices.

Meanwhile, the latest catastrophe auto-updated 4 times while you were reading."

I assume you're seing hints of antisemitism here (which is a real topic for French far left, don't get me wrong.)

That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1].

Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2]

[1] https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il...

[2] https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appe...

No. I think people who seriously took part i SpaceX IPO just bought a very expensive lottery ticket, while pretending that it's "being an SpaceX shareholder".

But it's fun to gamble (a bit) ! My personal limit for lottery ticket is 2€. I hope not too many people invested more than that.

And to be fair, SpaceX is probably the one thing for which Elon deserves the most praise.

There is a universe in which he has not been distracted into madness by twitter (and maybe kept Mrs Riley at his side.)

For all I know, we're already on Mars in this timeline.

Many people became millionaires last week during SpaceX IPO.

Surely they will "give back" to the giants whose shoulders they were standing on, and start creating foundations to hire back those researchers, grant them enough money to continue their deep work, file plenty of patents, and let the society keep reaping benefits from its greatest minds.

I mean, what else would they do, invest in cryptos and trophy partners and sport teams and ad-based time waster and surveillance ? Naaaaah

The first person who builds a successful meme around "fossil fuels are woke and for weak men, only solar-nuclear-punk is for real american machos" will have a vastly positive contribution to the world.

It's too bad that AI is only going to solve climate change and cure cancer, it would have been great if it could also cure asthma and solve rampant corruption.

Anyway, now that half of HN readers are SpaceX shareholder, directly or indirectly, how do we exercise the supreme power over the company, granted to us by capitalism, to ask the board to replace the turbines by another form of energy production in line with science ?

Should Europe put sensors on the US coast to continue measuring the collapse of the AMOC ? I'm not 100% sure the US navy would enjoy that.

Europe will find proxy measurements to confirm that, thanks in no small part to US politicians, pour climate will be even more FUed than expected.

We won't send flowers, but, hey, that's your country, and you got lower taxes and better return on your cryptos, so "the rest of the world" can go to hell, I suppose ?

This too shall pass, but it can't pass fast enough.

Won’t we get massive inflation?

I was expecting they would adress the elephant in the room : the price of the room to fit the elephant (as, in "rents").

There are form of subsidies in France called "APL" (nothing to do with the programming language - the form you have to fill in order to request the subsidy is waaay more cryptict.)

The tacit agreement in the flat renting business, is that your rent will be "whatever you earn as subsidy from the government, plus however we can afford to ask." So it's still a free market where homeowners get to set the price - because they own a scarce asset that is in high demand, probably because they wisely chose their parents and year or birth.

It's just that the subsidy artificially increase the floor price.

I've always wondered how a government implementing UBI would prevent such an effect on the goods that are the most scarce, unliquid, and high demand / low supply.

I wonder if this is reflected in other big exams or elite colleges elsewhere. Are the gaokao, X/Centrale, oxford etc... Results showing the same trend ?