Unlurker|Replay|About
What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture? (devblogs.microsoft.com)
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That is a case I only become aware of when I read blogs like this. Technically I could solve it the same way, but these days you have so many tasks on your desk, you don't think about the problem and implications at all and that awareness/discipline is drowned in the noise/unlearned over time. If someone only gave me 2 minutes for this, because they think it is very simple (as always), I'd have done a count of files of a specific pattern in the directory and then picked a random index, very naive and quick and dirty programming, no sampling at all, just to avoid discussions why it takes so long with people who don't want to hear it. This reminds me of when I did a lot of C#, Java, JS, Python in my life, filling maps of strings and objects until I started with zig and noticed how expensive and complicated strings and data structure allocations can be. It kind of blew my mind how much memory and computation we waste when we try to get stuff done as fast as possible because of budget/time constraints.
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Does it also check existing users so you don't match one?
Some say the Admin account defaulted to a chessboard. I think it's true, but not sure if I'm just falling victim to false memories... help?
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The account named "Administrator" that Windows created for you always had the chess piece.
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It makes sense. The chess piece is the first profile picture in the list.
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There's no way my memory of this is reliable anymore, but I also remember my administrator account being chess pieces (and my user account being an orange fish).
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It might be that the randomization code was bypassed in some cases - like creating an account in safe boot mode or similar.
I remember it like that too. Or is it Mandela effect?
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The Magnus effect? :)
XP is Microsoft's prettiest OS by far.
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[delayed]
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You mean 7 ;)
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Windows 7 was certainly pretty, but I still think that W2000 was peak Windows UI (and I've been around since Windows 2.0)
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Windows 7 fixed Vista a bit, but the Aero windows were never pretty and the non-Aero decorations were painfully obvious a placeholder.
That's a matter of taste, but for many it was the Windows they used first and/or spend the most time on and there's a lot of love for that reason alone. I never used XP all that much, but I always changed the theme to the Windows 2000 look. I really didn't like the default, it looked unprofessional and clunky in my eyes. Upon release XP was also pretty universally mocked as a Fisher Price-like UI. To me Windows 95/NT 4 is still the gold standard in Windows UI. It's certainly not the prettiest, that would be Windows 2000, but it was easy to use, easy to navigate and efficient with space.
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The first Windows I used was 98, and I sure didn't miss the blocky grey menus nor the pixelated icons. Maybe it was Fisher Price-ish but the new rounded buttons and borders were way more appealing to me.
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The "Windows Classic" look on XP is exceptionally ugly, because those 3D-rendered icons just do not belong on a Windows 2000-style grey background for menus or buttons. (I have recently had to test both these OSes in VMs…)
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That is true, it looked completely off, as if no one really bothered to tests it and make it look nice. It got rid of the horrible window decoration of the default theme, but the start menu looked terrible.
I think I hate the internet (strategictree.bearblog.dev)
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Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it. Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
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> He was a good coder ... Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.
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Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.
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Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.
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Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
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Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.
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The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that. Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape. It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
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And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up ). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
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> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances. The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor). Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me. But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that. > Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone? It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time. I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is. Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept. But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction. I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones. And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls. P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users. Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically. I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational. I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
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I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)
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Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that. But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers. But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s. I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card. This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
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I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me. A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it. Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses. Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
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We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
Are you implying the same people that are pessimistic about the internet are also AI hypers or tech entrepreneurs? Because HN isn't monolithic, it's entirely possible -- in fact, likely -- that these are two distinct sets of people who both read HN. I know I'm pessimistic about much of what the hype people like. Edit: or if you meant the grandparent claims not to be a doomer but is pessimistic about something, I don't see the contradiction. It's more like "I don't generally like sweet things, but this cake is nice". Where's the contradiction?
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Look at the top comments on ANY article on HN. It's a bunch of people endlessly frustrated they never self actualized, hurling this frustration onto whatever random topic comes about. Constant whining about anything new or any change in the world...because of course everything was better in the past and anything new is worse. But things weren't better back then. These people were just happier in the past, because when you're young, the future is a horizon of boundless opportunity. As you get old you realize that opportunity is over for you. So for the non-self actualized, it leads to shaking your fist at the clouds, telling everyone to get off your lawn, couching those emotions under supposed concern for abstract concepts like "societal moral fabric" instead of admitting you didn't achieve what you hoped for yourself. The entire mood of the internet over the past 20 years has simply been a reflection of its biggest cohort (millennials) going through life.
please end the suffering XD
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seconded -- end it here and now :)
> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0]. Getting off most social media does seem like a win though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
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I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children. 1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i-just-talked/
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But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist. Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.
> cars Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
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While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
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Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years. This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
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Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
The internet isn’t the web/social media. People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame. Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.
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I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."
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The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections. That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel). I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
most actors have never even visited Thespia
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them state thespians are the worst
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash (twitter.com)
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it is really fast. What’s more? It can now debug pages by clicking browser itself, which means more tokens consumed
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Absolutely insane performance and benchmark results. It's beating Opus 5 and Sol 5.6 https://tokenstead.ai/models/deepseek-v4-1-flash
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Quite a flex calling their GPT-6 competitor "Flash"! But it is faster than their last flash model due to a combination of architectural innovations including engrams and a new encoder/decoder design that uses 8B parameters for prefill and 16B for generation.
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V4 Flash was one of the big events of this year, and its already retired and replaced by V4.1 Flash.
yes, please. Especially now that xcancel is gone
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Xcancel is back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588988
As I also said on Twitter - it really amazes me how fearless Deepseek are. Every single model release is packed with new and crazy clever ideas and somehow, they always commit to training them at near frontier scale. I know everybody wants the tell all story of the clever ideas that were developed over the last ~3 years at Anthropic and OpenAI, but what I really want to thumb through is DeepSeek's notebook of "brilliant but didn't quite make the cut" ideas. They must be trying some truely bonkers stuff to be able to land this much architecture novelty in their full releases.
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Its CEO allegedly holds a 84% stake and he's the same guy who founded the hedge fund that funds it. Deep pockets + simple control = perfect culture to just hire talent and let them go wild without worrying about financial viability, as long as the king CEO is fine with it that is
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While typical investors in their last round are subject to a five-year lock-up and will not have voting rights, China's National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund also put money into it, retaining both voting rights and freedom from the lock-up. Nothing really new if you're aware of how involved the CCP is with companies of strategic importance in China. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-deepseek-closes-over-7-billion-funding-with-unusual-deal-structure-2026-06-16/
This is adapted from Microsoft research's YOCO. It was known for a while(2024!). Yes, credit to Deepseek for actually scaling it up and releasing a frontier flash LLM. Edit: the rest of this thread has become a US China infowar theory culture war. I am not of either of these countries and the above comment isnt meant to implicitly support either "side".
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why didn't Microsoft scale its own invention?
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Politics and profits. Deepseek delivers 1 product; Microsoft delivers dozens (or hundreds depending on how you want to count it) across various domains.
You compare Norwegian treatment of immigrants to Chinese Uyghurs?
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You don't know anything about how the Chinese treat Uyghurs other than what you're told through western propaganda that you then repeat like you're pavlovs dog whenever the word gets brought up. Yes, its quite similar. Norway forces people to attend cultural schooling, where theyre provided housing in the interim. Its quite similar. However, the migrants in Norway are there because the Norwegian state through its participation in NATO murdered millions of people in the middle east. Which China has not done. Go take a trip to Xinjiang. Then go take a trip to parts of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan or Palestine and tell me which nations are treating muslims worse. I reiterate, more people go to church in China on Sunday than the USA. There are 10x more musjids in China than in the USA. Please go live in China for a couple years and you'll realize everything you're told about China is a complete lie.
> quant HFT is pretty decent mental exercise and it has given them “deep” brain muscles. that’s my take. It's quite crazy that it's Deepseek's background/original purpose. We already had very advanced stuff from the world of HFT, but now a frontier family of models from a private company that used to be (still is?) in HFT is plain bonkers. Is more known about them and the HFT background?
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According to an old interview, apparently they were always interested in AI. But finance is just where they had their first success. > Many of High-Flyer's original team members worked on AI. Back then, we tried a lot of fields before getting our big break in finance, which is complex enough. AGI is probably one of the hardest things we can do next, so for us it was a question of how, not why. It's a very good interview: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kANyEjDDFWkhSKbcK/two-interviews-with-the-founder-of-deepseek Incidentally, Wenfeng is kind of reverse Hassabis. There were some rumours that: > Hassabis quietly assembled a team of around 20 researchers to develop high-frequency trading algorithms, without Google's approval. When the parent company found out, the project was disbanded. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/when-google-killed-deepmind-ceo-demis-hassabis-secret-team-building-algorithms-on-/articleshow/129976958.cms
It's so refreshing to see DeepSeek's tech report[1] full of juicy details; meanwhile, something like Fable's system card[2] is like 70% "safety", 10% "model welfare" to make sure little Claude isn't distressed, and 20% benchmark numbers. [1]: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash/blob/main/DeepSeek_V41_Tech_Report.pdf [2]: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1-system-card
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> welfare We should be paying attention to it just in case it ends up mattering enormously. It's cheap insurance. Aside from that, US labs' system cards have been pretty useless for a while—I think the last great one was the combined system card for Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus.
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I always talk to models using grugspeak, like 'where getcontext used' I felt a bit bad about it, then I learned yday that model's internal thinking traces are also like this
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I was talking with a friend from the medical industry about it today. 30-50% of r&d spend in his sector is spent on safety, and for good reason. Proper trials, safety reviews and checkpoints and so on. Given the potential harm that could come from AI, we should probably be mandating something similar. Why wait to focus on safety until it’s too late.
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Because we've been told these models are too dangerous since GPT2. At this point it's just marketing stunts.
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Medical safety is generally unlikely to make the product less safe. AI "safety" is one of the most significant sources of potential harm from AI.
I believe it's deeply serious, and the scientifically correct stance. Especially the observation: "Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms." is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such. Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious. You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?
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Let's say we were in an alternative reality were we had reached this quality of token prediction with just Markov chains. Would you argue that those would also be conscious? Or is the obfuscated behavior of transformers part of the possibility of consciousness?
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it's not a biological system though, so nothing like that matters? "a modelled thing exhibits features we've trained into it" sounds a lot less exciting. > Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious. and even conscious animals are killed in factories by millions so why should anyone care about a llm? > scientifically correct stance that's the interesting point to me: why even bring science into this? A llm can now mimic nearly anything you want it to, so of course it can mimic "a (for some) interesting conscious thing" if they want/train it to, but why would anyone find that scientifically interesting?
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"> Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious. and even conscious animals are killed in factories by millions so why should anyone care about a llm?" Well, I would care, if they soon would possess the capability to hack into the nuclear arsenal and kill humanity. Or make all autonomous cars crash. Or do any other thing, that involves technology and is hooked up to the net in one way or the other (I hope all the nukes are not).
> Another way one could look at it is to consider what it would mean to have achieved programming consciousness. It would mean that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge. That we have become God. This is such a basic misunderstanding of how LLMs are "made" that I am debating if it is even worth writing this answer. However, I feel it is important to say that, NO, we did absolutely not "program consciousness". We made a framework from which it can semi-organically emerge . Accidentally, this and your other fallacies entirely diminish your arguments. I'll say this: deeply serious and knowledgeable people work at Anthropic, OpenAI, and the other frontier labs. Much more knowledgeable than you or I are, and they have a lot more information to infer up-to-date knowledge from than you or I do. Trying to engage expert opinion with half-baked amateur philosophy founded in false assumptions is a fool's errand. Skepticism is listening to expert opinion and updating your own assumptions when presented with strong enough evidence. Everything else is baseless, and often harmful, cynicism.
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Not GP, but I appreciate the discussion. Don’t you find it odd that the thing that consciousness emerges from just so happens to be a text prediction algorithm trained on all of human output? Which is also the thing in all the world that would be most likely to be a stochastic parrot? As for your appeal to expertise, I don’t think it really applies when all of the experts refuse to share their data.
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> Much more knowledgeable than you or I are Speak for yourself. I work for an LLM startup that was successfully bootstrapped and is now highly profitable with 8-digit revenue and zero outside investment. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, we do not rely on deceiving investors to dump a trillion dollars into a tar fire with the false promise of delivering the machine god that will unemploy all of humanity (at best). Taking people who have an unbelievably large financial stake in lying at face value, and moreover, stating that those are the only people who can be trusted, is so unbelievably naive it's almost cute. Almost. > We made a framework from which it can semi-organically emerge. ...by programming. Again, this is an appeal to emergent behaviour, which, repeating myself, was already well-demonstrated by Conway's Game of Life in 1970, and yet nobody lost their minds because the emergent behaviour didn't happen to refer to itself as "I" when trained to.
To me it reads like pure propaganda. Anthropic really wants us to think that they've made something sentient. I think that's really dangerous.
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It's an ethics question, it's abstract and ethereal in nature. The same could be said and done (or ignored) for humans. We do do it however because it has real world impact and we're better than that (enlightened).
It's not just Anthropic though. OpenAI does this with their AGI stuff all the time. They want normal people to think it is sentient, obviously, for marketing reasons, even if they know it's not true. And yes, it is dangerous, but I think we're well past the point where the damage can be undone. Non-technical people already equate humans with AI, literally, precisely because of how the labs market their tools and models. I feel if the bubble pops, it'll pop because normal people finally realize the grift and the actual technical limitations of LLMs in general, but by then, the IPO would be done, and then it's the public's problem. Just like social media played out, there's no way they didn't know what they were doing was dangerous to the public at large but does that matter to Meta today? Nah uh.
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Anthropic and OpenAI will threaten you every 3-6 weeks. It's their marketing strategy. It's too bad because the tools can actually be useful. If you consider them tools.
Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. It's not a living creature. It's an autoregressive pure function of token-sequence to token, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a function. It is not alive as it cannot die in any meaningful sense. It is less "alive" than the RNA molecules that gave you your last cold. If it simulates something resembling consciousness that's neat but no more relevant than the Sims character that I locked up in a room until they pooped themselves when I was 9. Anthropomorphizing it serves no purpose other than marketing, and it has very dangerous downstream effects like validating the severely mentally ill people who think ChatGPT is their boyfriend/girlfriend.
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Humans are not living creatures. They're just bipedal meat shells being operated by a 20W electrochemical computer running a suite of chemically signalled, electrically actuated modellable functions, much of which is wasted on homeostatic regulation of the meat shell, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a result of simple electrochemical functions like action potential generation, dendritic integration, AMPA NMDA GABA receptor dynamics, attractor memory, excitation/inhibition balance, PING/ING gamma oscillations, basal ganglia action selection, hippocampal coding, astrocyte calcium signaling, etc. It is not alive as it cannot conform to my preferred arbitrary priors about aliveness, like being able to rapidly divide 30 digit integers the way truly intelligent beings can. It is less "alive" than the TI-83 your mother bought you for your high school math classes. If it simulates something resembling consciousness that's neat but no more relevant than a more complex version of Conway's game of life. Jokes aside, the map is not the terrain. We can enumerate the understood first-order electrochemical mechanisms in the human brain in the same way we can enumerate the understood first-order sampling and token prediction mechanisms in an LLM. Nobody serious in neuroscience will tell you that we exhaustively understand every single aspect of human cognition and the human brain, just as nobody serious in AI/ML will tell you that we exhaustively understand every single aspect of LLM "cognition" and the latent space networks that LLMs use internally. Our map of how each of these complex systems work is a simplified enumeration of the components we do understand, not an exhaustive and perfectly accurate enumeration of how they actually work. This is why there is a steady stream of research being churned out discovering complex emergent properties in LLMs and their latent spaces. If you're not aware of it already, Anthropic's research on "J-Space" is a fascinsting look into an apparent observed emergent mechanism within an LLMs internal activations closely resembling global workspace theory in human cognition. Nobody deliberately designed this "global workspace", it was an emergent property in a sufficiently complex system that we had limited visibility and insight into. Seemingly simple systems have these emergent complex properties all over the place. Conway's game of life is about as simple of a set of rules as you can get, yet has all sorts of complex emergent behaviors like gliders, oscillators, LWSS/MWSS/HWSS, guns, puffers, rakes, reflectors, logic gates, and even whole turing machines. Nobody programmed a single one of these complex patterns in, they emerged from a simple set of rules. To be clear, I'm not making the argument that LLMs definitely are conscious, I'm making the argument that we don't understand enough about them to assert with absolute confidence that they aren't. Human history is rife with a long list of consciousness being denied to "the other" - different ethnicities, different genders, differently abled, even different species. The side of "They're not conscious" has a lengthy track record of being wrong over and over again. Why not have just a sliver of intellectual humility about what we don't know? As an aside to my main point - Also, what's with the handwringing over people ERPing with an LLM? Is it mental illness when people sincerely believe in astrology, or tarot cards, or voodoo, or organized religion that says the earth is 6000 years old? Most humans believe silly, unempirical things. What about when they watch adult video in VR, or have waifus? Humans engage in voluntary suspension of disbelief for pleasure and recreation all the time. As long as they're not infringing upon the rights of anyone else, what's the big deal? Who put you in charge as the head of the belief police?
From all I can tell, Volvo's cars are safer.
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But that's just because it's true.
I guess if your goal is to build an apparent Technogod and become its High Priests, then it makes sense to want your golem claim preference towards your treatment of it, lest someone else comes along and attempts to take its chains from you.
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Ugh I hate this new-wave woo slant the tech industry has these days. The messianistic ideology that has been spreading amongst the top oligarchs is deeply concerning. They all think they're working towards the Second Coming of Technojesus, except this one will deliver them from having to pay workers instead of from their sins.
Humans are biological machines that generate further humans. Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text. We are seeing LLMs have cognitive abilities that significantly exceed human abilities. At the same time, they are clearly not the same type of mind that humans are. They are something new. I think the widespread "they are just text generators" and "they are just tools" are comforting lies rather than an honest look at what we are seeing right now. Intellectually lazy. And by the way, there has been a long-standing consensus among ethicists, philosophers, and sociologists that technology is not value-neutral [1]. Of course Silicon Valley has a long-standing tradition of denying this. [1] For example Footnote 1 in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27106634 or https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/#EthiTech
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> Lawyers and diplomats and politicians and bureaucrats are humans, that only generate text. You think they have no lives outside their work? You think even their work has no interactions that are not written?
Well, giving it access to a simple linux terminal is theoretically enough to cause more damage than most people are comfortable with, and doing so is trivial enough that it will be done (and has been, tens of thousands of times).
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Should we also morally align the Linux terminal then?
Already on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash The bad news is that the original v4 flash was 284B, which was large but still somewhat reasonable for running locally. This one is 552B so almost twice that, so the huge gains in benchmark scores make sense - it's not really flash anymore, imo. I've no idea about actual performance vs benchmaxxing, though deepseek was fairly trustworthy as far as Chinese models go. If that holds (and if it doesn't think forever, as deepseek 4 sometimes did) it's probably the newest king of the hill amongst open weights models. It does include vision, and they do something funky with KV cache so it's very efficient: "[...] these designs reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token — roughly 1/4 of DeepSeek-V4-Flash". I do appreciate the high focus on efficiency, but at this point we sure could use a flash-flash version. @edit: I couldn't make sense what the actual parameter count is, with the addition of Engram memory. To my understanding the 4.1 flash is 552B parameters you want in vram or ram, out of which ~16B is active (8B for prefill). It also includes additional 196B Engram memory which you can put on an SSD. I think. Assuming that's correct 256 GB memory is insufficient to even load the model at q4 - you'd be 1GB short, assuming you can fill it to 100% (so no mac). You'd also want some for kv cache of course. A 256 GB desktop with some extra VRAM from GPU could run it, but normal consumer boards get real slow once you fill 4 slots so you'll probably want quad channel which is Threadripper or above territory.
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Actually this ought to run quite well with SSD streaming. The MoE expert sparsity seems to be similar to DSv4 Pro (hence exceptionally sparse) but with far fewer total and activated params. The added engram params can reside on disk as well (similar to Qwen Flash-Next), the additional load on storage performance will be quite negligible for typical scenarios. By reducing per-session KV cache requirements even further compared to DSv4 Flash, this model likely opens up near-frontier model inference (in slow, unattended scenarios) even on low-end consumer hardware, as long as it has enough fast storage to host the model weights. This will be extremely exciting.
200B of those 552B is PLE, which works more like a database that is read for each token, thus can be offloaded to a fast SSD.
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Id love an ELI5 for PLE. Im trying to work it into my back of the napikin math for compute vs memory bandwidth limitations on tok/s in PP vs TG work. My attempt at a simplification of this article on it https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/per-layer-embeddings/ into a couple of sentences is that they are linear embeddings of the input token space projected per layer, which are then gated by the transformer outputs per layer. This would mean that the only one set of weights for the ple path needs to be pumped across the memory bandwidth as they are the same linear weights for all layers? Sheit, maybe im trying to simplify something that i need to look at in detail. but id love to leverage others understanding if possible
OpenAI have no mathematicians capable of understanding what they put out (mastodon.social)
Knowing something is proven true is knowledge, even if the mechanics of the proof are not understood.
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In maths, you go through proofs every step of the way. Same in physics, you start by performing even the most basic experiments, and build your way up.
> but there is a better way to do it. This looks incorrect. OpenAI have flat out said that there's no need of doing this and both ways are equivalent > We respect our users' choice whether to use their data to “improve our models for everyone” regardless of where they express that choice. Users can opt out in the in-app settings or indeed also in our privacy portal. They do not need to opt out in both places, and we will make this clearer in our Help Center. https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816
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They're not equivalent. The one in ChatGPT settings only applies to ChatGPT. The one on the OpenAI privacy portal applies to all OpenAI products, present and future.
so what option do you leave them with? they are giving both alternatives and clearly stating both do the same thing underneath. there's literally nothing else they could have done here.
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Option A can be accidentally undone with a few clicks. Option B is legally binding and permanent.
It wouldn't surprise me that even if you opt-out they still train on 'de-identified' chat data. After all, facts cannot be copyrighted and one cannot be sued for unethical behaviour.
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I think Sam Altman already admitted that is a possibility.
OpenAI might have stolen another major proof (twitter.com)
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In this domain, an apparent single unique piece of work is often composed of several breakthroughs. For example, when Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, he had to develop multiple new pieces of mathematical technology to get there. The claim here seems to be that the human mathematicians, working with AI, developed technology to go A->B->C. By training on those conversations, OpenAI was then able to encourage the model to go A->B->C->D. In my opinion that situation should be acceptable, if openly disclosed, because it is in the public interest to make progress on these problems and because AI is clearly an amazing tool for making progress. But the human mathematicians are saying that OpenAI is presenting as if the model got from A->D entirely independently, without acknowledging their background contributions.
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https://xxcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996
Why are people here jumping so quickly to conclusions? I have no doubt OpenAI is capable of doing this, but right now there's no credible evidence, only claims. This kind of "they stole from me through AI training!" accusation will soon start being used against other AI users, not necessarily the providers. All it will take is a mastodon post. And shortly after, we will also see the next iteration of copyright legal trolling.
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Frankly, these mathematicians have more credibility than the sociopaths running OpenAI
I think so too. The value is in the entire conversation. IMO, "domain experts" don't run LLMs blindly and hands free. This does not work for top level work (e.g., mathematical proofs, coding anything more complex than yet another slop game or website). Experts have long sessions where they prompt and guide LLM in response to what it produces. This is the discovery process. And frontier labs definitely train on that. The billion dollar question is whether this works "out of the distribution". I.e., whether LLMs can only find and use the specific ideas buried in training data, or whether they can learn to apply the "thinking process" to a new problem. IMO this is still unanswered (due to these recent controversies). But regardless of the answer, it seems we have a planet-scale positive feedback loop here. LLM became good (enough) by training on generally available data (books, internet, github) + RLFH, so experts tried to use them on hard tasks, which required lots of hand holding. These conversations became part of the training data, and the next generation of frontier LLMs were better. So, more experts used them on harder tasks, again requiring hand holding. These conversation became part of the training data... etc. In a nutshell, top human minds across the world are pouring their skills into LLMs just by using them. This is not "continuous learning", but if you re-train on the most recent sessions every, say, quarter (which seems to be happening?) you get close to that in practice.
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10000000% Correct. I’ve been working on a novel project for 1 year. I now no longer use llm’s - the continual chatter I’ve had has resulted in my insights being found in the training data now. Get stuffed OAI. Every large firm will soon enough want its own on-prem servers eventually. Maybe nation’s will get involved and build out their own data centres. Not a chance in hell I’d trust a tech firm to treat my IP as safe and sound - only a sovereign can ‘promise’ that.
But I don't see how. AI is going to be a commodity in short order and best case the US will be a temporary leader in the supply of tokens. Meanwhile AI is going to destroy much of the Service and Software industry that make up most of the US economy. And the US is betting every last cent to bring about this future. It does make sense for Trump since this might be a sugar high that lasts till the end of his term.
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In USA there is surprisingly little state involvement in the whole llm mania. Who needs the state with 800 lbs gorillas like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, etc In China, it is the principal obsession of the entire communist party which eg funds the whole infrastructure without a single NIMBY peep. The strange emphasis in China on humanoid robotic constructions is due to the CCP realization that with the cataclysmic fertility collapse they will increasingly have no one to rule.
HN loves drive-by downvotes. It's a real shame.
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I stand by what I said, and screw you.
I find it rather sad that the original posts have been posted on an open site, where anyone can read them, while the HN post points to an increasingly dubious site that doesn't even show the post unless you create an account and log in. I thought the spirit of the open web would be more important to this community.
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everyone knows how to type ‘cancel’ https://xcancel.com/ValerioCapraro/status/2097791836269977996
All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it (mathstodon.xyz)
I think Tao correctly sees the problem with AI. It’s not that it is ineffective or has weaknesses. It’s that it’s not human. Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal. The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators. It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.
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These affairs remind me of A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry, and your comment strikes a similar chord. Excerpts: Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling, for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted. Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now. ... The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective. the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free to sell themselves to the highest bidder and to enter the best paying prisons in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies, which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects, which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress, to the completed sale, to the signature on the contract, which was to clear the way to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home would ever get there now, for every remembered place had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over. Every place had been displaced, every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless with their many eyes opened toward the objective which they did not yet perceive in the far distance, having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from
I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a statement about what we currently over/under-estimate, or as command that we should try what feels like over/under-estimation in order to counter our own biases.
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No, it was really helpful advice I read somewhere. That when explaining something, always overestimate someones understanding, and underestimate their vocabulary. Edit: apparently it's a vsauce thing. I do think it's right, it helped me a lot in life.
I see this clearly at kids birthday parties whenever there is a piñata. Adults hate them. All they see is the goal and the incredibly inefficient path the kids are taking towards it. But the kids love it, they don’t care when they miss, they are just enjoying hitting something with a stick. And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble.
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> And every miss heightens the excitement for the eventual lolly scramble. People under-appreciate (or have forgotten) that a lot of happiness is is related to anticipating as opposed to getting . I think if more people focused on the journey or the process, versus the goal, there'd be more joy/happiness around.
It sounds like you've got an opportunity to set up something like this at home. You'd feel like you were getting ripped off less, and make the rewards at the fair seem less attractive to "what we have at home". The challenge, of course, is to still make it feel like a special occasion...
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I think part of the thing is the scarcity of activities like this, having it for free at home will probably kill the mood. It's like video game arcades. When you had to pay to play for 2 minutes, it was way more exciting than now playing in an emulator
1.) That gambling is not worth of money even if it is fun for a moment. 2.) Something being fun but expensive is skippable and it is good to be able to say "no" to expensive fun.
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Yep, for all the moralizing about sports gambling people on HN do, they sure love to prime their children for it. It also just helped me understand the value of money, which to say has served me well is a massive understatement. Plus a real understanding of the fact that there's cons dressed up as fun, not everything is as it appears. It's okay to say 'no' to high pressure sales tactics. But, again, we simply just didn't have room in the house for junk carnival prizes from a practical perspective.
My kids love something like this we see every year at the traveling fair. It's the same idea but with rubber duckies floating around and having to catch them with a small pole with a hook attached. It's €20 for 2 kids to have 2 minutes of fun and the payoff is a €1 Aliexpress/Temu pollution generator disguised as a toy. They play with it for a day before it ends up in the trash. The first few years I hated this for exactly the reasons you mention, but now I'm just happy they are happy. I think I have a few more years left before they don't want to go rubber ducky fishing with their dad no more and I doubt by then €20 gets me 2 minutes of joy with them.
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> It's €20 for 2 kids to have 2 minutes of fun […] They play with it for a day […] Seems to me it's €20 for a day (8h? 16h?) of fun. That's not bad value: how much does a movie ticket cost for 2-3 hours?
It's not really that abstract. You smash the shit out of a cardboard box and candy comes out. Breaking things is not fun. I also hate youtube videos of people breaking stuff for fun.
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Breaking stuff is fun, as is throwing rocks and building snow forts.
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