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OpenAI's Sam Altman to Brief UN Security Council Next Week (reuters.com)
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I find it very hard to understand the things these AI CEO's say. He will probably get up there and say his companies products will destroy every citizen of their countries.
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How's AI doing in Russia with all the sanctions and whatnot?
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The founder of Loopt is now ruling the world.
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If governments regulate AI and make it slow down, does that let one get out of data center contracts?
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He will probably tell them exactly what they want him to say. If he means it or not. That is hard to say.
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The private equity debt time bomb is here. Then there is the bond market. And then guaranteed bust of AI bubble. 2000 billion dollars for a single company? That too when bottom of the boat has been drilled by open weight Chinese models that are cheaper and good enough but can even be deployed locally? In face of all that - that kind of return is not realistic. However - good gimmick scaring UN asking for a ban on Chinese models perhaps.
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The UN is not a body that would be involved in banning models from a specific country, and even if they were China is one of 5 members with permanent veto power.
A great marketing opportunity for Grifty McGriftface.
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A friend him called Uncle Sam Alternative-man, thought it was accurate and clever
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W (lithub.com)
On another note - Indians often switch the w’s and v’s. I don’t know why. If you’re Indian - try pronouncing victory, whisky, and wonderful.
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Czech is my mother tongue and I have regular issues with this too (have been mainly English speaking for the last 10 years). Czech does not have a /w/ sound and it confuses me the other way as well, like you said with "victory".
Finnish W is inherently tied to Swedish W. Historically, V and W were the same letter, and they could be used interchangeably. W was generally preferred in Fraktur and V in Antiqua. In the 19th century, the orthography changed to use V everywhere, except in some proper names. This happened a bit earlier in Swedish than in Finnish. And, recently, V and W became separate letters. In 2006 in Swedish and (arguably) in 2022 in Finnish.
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Yes, thanks for the addition! I though about mentioning the link to Swedish W but wasn’t fully sure about the details.
The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
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Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.
I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot (github.com/kyle-pena-nlp)
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The worst part about this is someone still using poetry for python development.
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Given Jev does System 1 thinking, this would be equivalent to your ADHD heavy friend.
I had the same sort of thing going on ahah. But I was convinced some hoje must have already done it and I decided I’d research when I got home (I’m out today). Didn’t expect it to reach hacker news so soon, though!!
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I tried this too but it’s literally addressed in their docs already so I don’t think it’s much of a discovery https://docs.typesafe.ai/model-jaggedness/jev-1.13#generation
Good ideas are the survivors of lots of bad ideas. Slack is glorified IRC yet they're worth billions. Dropbox can be trivially implemented via rsync yet they're worth billions.
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There is a canonical hacker news post about Dropbox being useless and a pointless idea at one point :)
>> write me a short story > a story I think this is the first time I’ve knowingly laughed at a model’s joke.
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Reminds me of the very early LlMs. I also sometimes miss the sheer demented horror of early image models told to generate images of biology.
Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM (en.sedaily.com)
On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment. The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies. The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.
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I read HBM yields are 25-30% (vs 80-90%) making them 3 to 5 times as expensive. They are 4-5 years behind, that probably means 1-2 in Chinese time.
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Does that include yield from packaging?
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Tokens per second is almost entirely memory bandwidth at inference time, training obviously needs more compute but you can add more chips for that.
People want to produce hbm because it’s more expensive and more profitable than regular memory.
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There is a world where scale and experience means it's about the same though, is the thing. And memory is already expensive. It's downright hard to even get it though - you frequently would prefer not what's cheapest, but whatever is in largest scale production.
Without further clarification, that statement seems impossible. "As much" being unbounded and all. You should expand what you mean.
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This will blow your mind, but it actually is pretty close to being unbounded. :) Consider the 'MMA N matrices' primitive modern CPUs are starting to support. For the current generation of CPUs, N is a constant like 16 or 32, but there's nothing preventing it from 1024 or larger if we have more memory bandwidth. All this with a single instruction.
That hasn't been true since early HBM2 days, before the controllers standardized on power/voltage management and did things like leave them in P0 to ship on time
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LPDDR/DDR/GDDR generally still win over HBM when there’s no data being transferred. HBM is primarily better in watts/byte transferred. Consumer electronics spend most of their time idle.
It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.
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I don't fully understand the source of the "total bytes" constraint, but a major factor may be because HBM4 / HBM4E can only make use of the footprint directly above the processor/logic die (or in direct vicinity of its interconnect), while traditional DRAM can be placed further away where there's lots of real estate on the motherboard. I gather a practical max ceiling today is a stack of 16 chips in height yielding 64GB? These chips have a massive bus size of 2048 bits, instead of the 64 or 128 bits (dual channel) used by DDR5. That's what gives them their order-of-magnitude bandwidth speedup. But even though they technically pack in more capacity per square millimeter of motherboard , I gather they take up more space than older technologies once you account for the vias and interconnects to route all those signals.
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Thanks for that, just went down an interesting rabbit hole. Many of us were hoping this re-tooling would eventually trickle some fast RAM down to DRAM-exhausted PCs, but given it would require a rearchitecture of the motherboard it's unlikely.
Yup, the only reason Macs have higher memory bandwidth is because they use more memory channels, which gives them a wider bus. Both Intel and AMD only allow more than dual channel memory on server class processors these days.
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Except strix halo.
AMD does market segmentation and limits consumer chips to dual-channel. You need to cough up the dough and get Threadripper for quad-channel. Or even more for Threadripper Pro to get octa-channel.
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As I mentioned above AMD's Strix Halo has quad channel memory and is consumer level. But yes, other than that everything is segmented away.
More channels or soldered memory? Channels are basically RAID 0 so it depends what you're measuring. Soldering memory down was the only way to use LPDDR5X so if you wanted the best memory you had to solder it down. LPCAMM2 exists though so newer devices can use that instead of soldering them down, but not all devices would be able to fit the required LPCAMM2 slots.
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SOCAMM2 allows for removable ram in nearly 0 added space.
If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.
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I missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone
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Supposedly OpenAI is paying 2025 prices.
What if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models? I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue. Sound familiar?
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More likely they would sell a chip with the model etched in silicon for the dramatically higher token/s.
It relates in the sense there's a minimum cost of production without losses, not the actual price people are willing to pay.
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Framing it in terms of the price people might be willing to pay for a single product in isolation frames the point I was making, which was about price competition, right out of the picture. Maybe I'd be willing to pay $10 for product A if I had other options. But if there's a product B for $3 that's not quite as nice but still ticks all my boxes, then product instantly becomes a lot less attractive.
Unpredictable things happen routinely, therefore these specific unpredictable things will happen?
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These things aren't really unpredictable. Work long enough on a robot with more dexterity and you will get just that. The timetable on when it happens is a bit more up in the air, economic downturns and wars can have huge impacts on it. But in my mind robots and superintelligence are inevitable unless there is a massive setback in humanity before then. Nature already did it once. We're not inventing something totally new. Add in every new invention and bit of intelligence we build on and actualize pushes us that much closer to the goal. Information technology allows this to speed up even further with easy sharing of information and testing. Superintelligence is not like faster than light travel. We have many frameworks that show us FTL is impossible. I don't believe there is a single widely accepted framework that shows there is some limit to intelligence and we're near it. Intelligence isn't even a singular thing. My calculator is a super intelligent adder compared to me. It would seem highly improbable that somehow nature random walked into making brains the most efficient general intelligence device in all dimensions and scales.
A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.
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Maybe this leads to device manufacturers using HBM memory instead.
Keep in mind that total manufacturing capacity is increasing as well. Perhaps not enough to fully offset, but it's incorrect to assume that supply capacity is flat.
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It'll take a lot of time. Micron has been working on expanding in Boise since around 2023. They are predicting that the first new chips will start rolling out around 2027. I don't think we'll see any relief until at least 2028 or even later. And even then, probably not without antitrust laws being enforced. Because you know memory manufacturers won't just simply drop prices, they have a long history of price fixing.
Trying the Software Factory Pattern (lethain.com)
So I ended up doing something similar: - Create a Git Hub project board for issues - Connect Grok to the above - Use Grok voice mode to take ideas, have Grok refine them with me and then save them as issues - Created slash commands in OpenCode like /ni (new issue), /do (do an issue), /curr (what is the current issue), /done (self explanatory) - I generally tell the OpenCode instance to /do <number> and then off it goes This give me several benefits: - I can use Grok Voice while walking or driving to develop and test ideas - I can lose my entire local OpenCode setup but still have relevant data in the issues - multiple machines can read from GitHub - I could go even further and have separate user accounts for each of my bots. Having been both a PM, dev, SRE and manager, this really does feel like managing a team of devs.
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> I can use Grok Voice while walking or driving to develop and test ideas Musk would be so proud. Do you by any chance drive a cybertruck too? Seriously, don't do this while you're driving. Or even while your car is driving. Its dangerous to be distracted in that situation.
don't work while driving, you're putting other people at risk by being distracted
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Bro this board is called Hacker News. Let us shove the needle in our prefrontal cortex and use dolphin white matter to hack into SpaceX's network to issue commands to Grok using some ancient sumerian dialect and keep this shit signaling for your Washington Post interview.
and do you ever look at the code afterwards? The 'software factory' gets exponentially nastier the longer it is kept running without someone with actual experience 'shoving it' back in shape ever so often ... and even then.
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Sounds like token burn maxing to me. Ie end up with a lot of “not quite” prototypes soooo try again?
I totally agree with this. Agents seem tremendously bad at UI to me. Maybe it's just because I am a back end guy. Right now I'm working on a declarative UI framework which can help me along here. My thought is that if I sacrifice a little control for sane primitives, that will make that spec /build loop easier. I think ClayUI is a really interesting "reduced instruction set" for UI. I don't know that immediate mode UI is the right call for anything web related (that's how you get React lol) but his reduced primitive layer is very interesting to me
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> Right now I'm working on a declarative UI framework which can help me along here After your first para, I was about to suggest exactly that (well, maybe not writing your own). I find that frameworks (both front-end and back-end) constrain the LLM's choices and result in both sensible defaults and improved consistency. Of course, you will immediately hit the problem all frameworks have: customer requirements that the framework components don't quite meet. Still, great for RAD.
US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution (text.hrw.org)
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Crazy idea: Power Plants could still do the right thing.
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Power Plants answer to the shareholders, hence…
I'm so tired of this. Please someone bring back people with critical thinking abilities.
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Like the greens in Germany who decided it's best to shut down nuclear power plants?
In a world as of a couple years ago, when nobody called CO2 “air pollutant”.
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But that is a lie. CO2 was air polutant 30 years ago 20 years ago and basically forever. It is only in the post-truth society of right wing anti-climate influencers that apparently someone tries to redefine the terms to exclude it.
We're already paying for and will continue to pay more for the downstream effects of climate change some way or the other, you just refuse to or are unable to look at the bigger picture.
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Tell China and India to stop building coal plants first, and also ban private jets, and then we can talk.
I think this is good idea. I am not against combating climate change, but it can't come at the expanse of our economy. If you disagree stop using whatever device you are reading this on.
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Do you have children?
> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.
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Yet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors.
I am often wrong (borischerny.com)
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Heh, I have the opposite... uh "problem". I am often right. This has two negative effects; 1) I start to believe my own hype because I am so consistently correct- which blinds me to other ideas if I don't actively take steps to humble myself. (after all, I won't be right very often if I stop listening, as that's part of why I am right, because I listen to people and have a huge amount of context) and 2) I am able to quickly come to a conclusion which makes people uneasy, as they think I haven't considered all the points even though I have- and it's also true that people have a bias to inaction unless it's an urgent issue.. this is how things get stuck in committees and meetings and continually get kicked down the road because it's difficult to get everyone together and there's a million reasons to keep deferring meetings. What I'm trying to say is, don't sit there thinking that "if only I could make correct decisions"- because even if you are quick, correct and decisive: you will ruffle feathers. (at the risk of sounding arrogant: i'm not saying I'm right about everything , like the red baron, I pick my battles very carefully).
I'll be honest, I don't actually understand what people mean when they say Claude Code is bad software. Seems pretty good to me. Presumably this is about the TUI version?
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I'm surprised you think Claude Code is good software. I find it so hard to use because it is fundamentally constrained as a TUI. It is buggy, clunky and slow. It is sooo slow. One example of what is particularly bad with it: tool calls and progress. Codex UI does it so much better. The way in which CC waits for a task to complete etc is really poorly done compared to Codex. Another thing that's missing: no way to continue a side chat in Claude Code - this is easy in Codex with /side and it is super usefu.
Do you really think that having this many issues is justifiable/ok? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues
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I dont't really know stats about such things, but I assume the adoption of CC has been insane compared to almost anything, and is also like two years old? Yeah, not surprised. But also, if they all use 500 agents daily and latest models can "one shot" everything, one would think 5k issues are fixed in no time... Havent used CC in some time, worked fine last time I tried.
Having listened to him give a couple of talks I am always struck by how much he talks and writes like Claude code. I don’t think he farms out all of his writing and talking to LLMs. I don’t think Claude code was trained to emulate him or anything. I think his “voice” has been filed LLM smooth by years of agent based interactions. He claims Anthropic engineers use an average of 500+ agents a day. They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner. Unfortunately, I see Claude being wrong often enough that I view it as a faulty narrator. Often helpful, sometimes totally full of it. And now I subconsciously apply this filter to anything that sounds like Claude. Makes me nervous that my voice may be becoming that of a faulty narrators.
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>"They are human interfaces to token generators more than human to human communication. They are picking up the tendencies of their most frequent communication partner." I see this happening at work, too. All communication and collaboration between engineers has broken down. Juniors don't have questions anymore. Seniors don't discuss architecture anymore. Everyone is just off in their own world of feature work with the only interaction coming at merge time. Really depressing what has happened to our trade.
This principle is basically a movie quote, though.
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No it's not, though?
It’s basically OODA loop, which is itself just as descriptive of how people act and adjust than it is prescriptive. How else would you describe iteratively solving problems?
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These steps, but in many other arbitrary orders, some with feedback to previous steps
Prompts aren’t Real (evaluation.club)
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This was great! When you think about optimizing prompts with GEPA (or comparable methods and tools), do you consider each tool or skill separately? How do you think about the optimization of the system prompt for a large agentic system? I imagine that you do a collection of passes to cover each overlapping set of what you want evaluated, but the system prompt makes all cases dependent on each other. What I’ve done in the past is use the system prompt to extract subjective criteria for an LLM judge (like various system prompt statements that contribute to brand voice) and check individual traces with that for evaluation, but I’d like to move beyond including that in a prompt at all.
The format of this article makes it almost impossible to read. I gave up after about 10 "pages".
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Ohhh, i didn't realize there was more, from mobile it looks as if the article ends on the first image, and the images are like other articles (the first being a self link)
I hope the future of AI isn't this sort, where companies provide the user/customer with an interface to an AI that can do things for the user... I would much prefer that companies instead provide an interface FOR an AI, and the user brings their own AI which connects to that interface. In other words, provide my AI with tools, instead of providing me an AI that uses your tools. That way, my AI can bring all the context it needs, and I can bring all of the settings and knowledge about what I want with me. I don't want a fractured world of tons of AIs i interact with where I have to explain all the fundamental information about what I want and how I work every time. This also has the benefit of sidestepping the issue the essay is talking about. You provide a consistent tool, and the AI weirdness is not your issue anymore. You don't have to worry about solving for all the weird ways people prompt the AI, or the ways they break.
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This is like asking LG to make TVs where you can bring your own video input. It just doesn't make economic sense when they can extract so much money by owning the glass.
A better internet is one in which LLMs enable everyone to ride their own custom Chromium (or whatever) flavor and the "frontend" of > 90% of sites - especially e-commerce - is generated specific to the user given their configuration of their personal LLM intermediary. Companies will increasingly not ship frontends anymore, maybe just themed components that most users will ignore. "Pages" naturally become synthetic amalgamations of the various things you are interested in from various sources. Your preferred UI/UX comes for free courtesy of your LLM intermediary. Everything is an API. Regulation will probably be needed to enforce this on the data access side given the incentives for companies to resist despite the benefit to the consumer. A relatively easy solution is to make it part of the requirements to take payments online, which is already highly regulated. The goal would be that essentially to operate anything approaching e-commerce online you must allow consumer AI intermediaries sufficient access that they could independently construct whatever your current frontend is from the publicly available API/MCP endpoints. The tricky part of engineering around privacy/personas, account creation, etc. will be relatively easy following such state intervention. Take payments - virtual credit cards are already a useful way to protect data and mitigate risks when dealing with multiple vendors. This sort of API is a natural fit for a world in which companies are not allowed to box you into their horrible UIs, most of which are simply lazy attempts at copying the most profitable anti patterns of their competitors. Let your personal agent generate a unique card for each vendor behind the scenes. Why should you have to care? How much better the internet would be if every UI/UX was in a meaningful sense, your own.
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I feel like this is a bit too-optimistically describing an outcome which is unlikely given how consumers have been slowly losing the same war for decades now. The elephant in the room and the really "tricky part" involves powerful advertising and copyright-holding companies. They will (continue to) interpret that kind of user-agency as an existential threat. Their businesses revolve around deciding and knowing what you actually see and do with your computer, and their toolkit isn't just technical, but also economic and political. That's why we already have problems with DRM, "felony contempt of business model" under the DMCA, browser fingerprinting, and everybody surrendering to arbitrary JS code controlling their computer. We capitulate not just to see an article or talk to a friend, but also to avoid our technical details getting blacklisted in some secret un-appeal-able database as "maybe not a real consumer."
One-Electron Universe (en.wikipedia.org)
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How meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?
A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe. It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
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Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again! My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
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I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it. Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience. One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps. Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." [0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1990-zuboff.pdf
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story. As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060
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> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time. > the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
Where is the machine you used to type out this comment, and when did you type it?
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Human language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia. It is good enough to get laid, though.
ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector (buchodi.com)
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This might help: ``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ``` Does this look right? AdGuard style.
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Love how there's an extremely lengthy explanation of the oldest way to track people on the internet like this shit hasn't been happening since cookies were created.
https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f289ec003f?ucc=t8c6BkzVOh8 why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.
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> just post the prompts instead. Why would anyone want that?
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Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better? At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.
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Why comment if you have nothing good to say?
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How is this adding to the discussion? The post in itself is quite informative.
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Do you constantly want to be reading ai-generated content on this site? If so, why not just stay on chatgpt.com and ask it to generate what hackernews.com would look like today? It's adding to the discussion because I feel like the author broke a social contract by probably putting less effort into writing this than I did reading it.
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There's a certain irony in linking to someone else and then saying "use your own words". If we follow that, we get a pretty obvious answer: sometimes someone else can express it better and faster. Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.
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It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says > This blog is where I write about what I find. Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.
The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Much of this information plus a shit ton of other information (ie, LEOs have access to credit reporting) can be bought by governments from the shady data broker networks already. If people still ignorantly claim this isn’t a George Orwellian dystopia …
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> The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming. Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed. The quiet part you rarely hear is that advertising is a smoke and mirror industry akin to throwing darts at a wall. The idea of "homing darts" that stick the target a percentage more of the time would be very attractive in this analogy. Tech turns advertising from mostly a buckshot spread into something that kinda sounds like something solid and real ("Look, numbers! CTR! CPC! KPI! Our ad product WORKS! Paying customers for your business, guaranteed!") Ad budgets almost never correlate with actual performance.[0] We're all just lying to ourselves that this business model is performing as expected, and I don't think a reckoning is that far off. 0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/
I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation. Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.
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And the sane world is fighting the EU BS with geo blocking. Just set up your user agent to work as you wish, isn't that simpler than have unelected, technologic dumb bureaucrats writing laws that are complex and don't solve the issue?
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Are you equally happy that the EU is attempting to mandate backdoors into technological platforms and outlaw private encrypted communication?
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Copypasting my reply to someone who made almost exactly the same point in a sibling comment earlier: Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI [though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy] Things could be worse. It could be like most of the US where there are both no (or at least far fewer) protections against invasive behaviour of private companies and the government actively trying to backdoor private comms.
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> I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation. As long as you manage to navigate all the dark patterns and not accidentally give your "informed consent".
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Malicious compliance (or as it more usually is malicious noncompliance that has not been sufficiently punished so the slimy buggers feel free to continue) is something you should blame the stalkers of adtech for, more than the EU. The legislators could perhaps have made the definitions less wavy, and been harder with enforcement, but that doesn't make it all their fault.
> Some outcomes can be annoying I'd classify mandatory encryption backdoors as an industry crisis rather than an annoyance.
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When has the EU mandated encryption backdoors?
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Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI? [though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]
I don't know if the destruction of many industries in the EU--including manufacturing--can be called an annoyance. All the EU bureaucrats can do is regulate, that's why it's so difficult to do business in the EU and that's why there is so little innovation over here. If Microsoft and Apple were started in the EU they would've been shut down within a week because you can't operate from a garage. I guess that every once in a while this might have a positive outcome for consumers, a broken clock is right twice a day.
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I don't see how that's relevant? Regulation might have limited some innovation in tech, but gdpr does not affect any of the dying industries. That's more from competition with china, companies with too much interest in giving payouts to shareholders than to innovate, and US financial industry buying most of the best players
The obsession with ACs in some places (or rather people I guess) is something I will never sympathize with. Just wear reasonable clothes for the weather, no need to cool down below 20° C. And yes, I'm going to die on that hill.
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What a shitty hill to die on. I don't know if this is a genetic thing, but as a scandinavian who wears shorts down to like 12C, I am unable to function in >30C humid weather. Anything more labour intensive than drinking sangria on ice is not getting done. This year we had up to 37C in Denmark. If you're able to tolerate heat well, I'm happy for you, but my sleep was ruined for months this summer. Not to mention the people who literally died. I'm investigating my options for at least cooling down the bedroom at night, because I'm not going through this nonsense again. Plastic straws are banned now and we're sorting garbage in 42 different bins, so I'm thinking that about evens it out, environmentally.
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I see the heat pump hype shaking my head thinking how people long ago use to build with mud and made walls 2-3 meter thick. It takes the entire winter/summer for the climate to get in. The Amish hang wet bed sheets in front of the window (with a tob under it to recycle the water) not sure how well this works in the Netherlands with 95-99% humidity, it certainly wont raise humidity but evaporation might be shit. Not every bathroom is fit for it but if there is no AC and things become unbearable I put the shower head upside down so that the ceiling and walls get wet and it rains everywhere. Then I daisy chain fans to "tunnel" the air into the bathroom. The temperature drops like a rock.
I never set my AC to lower than 25°C. Why would you need below 20°C? Is it something about having only a single unit for the hole house/office, where it's then uncomfortably freezing in one area, just to have a normal temperature in the distant areas? Crazy.
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> Why would you need below 20°C? For example because I literally can’t sleep well above 20°C.
The technology isn't anything new but, it's the context that makes it so uncomfortable. People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription
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I don’t think there is any consistency in behavior. People react viscerally to the unproven belief that the Facebook app records conversations. They’ll also happily buy big TVs despite the fact they’re very much listening to you and we have solid evidence that it’s for ads or residential proxying. Most people have no idea how ads “follow” you, or how companies can figure out what you talked about by connecting the dots from other user metadata.
This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it. AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scraping-feud ). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.
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It is hilarious that this got downvoted, even when it's entirely factually accurate. I encourage the downvoters to respond to the content.
Likely a reference to ELIZA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
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Are there really people that can't tell the difference between ELIZA and something that can solve open Millennium Prize Problems in math?
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Their ego doesn't let them see the difference.
People don't believe me that Cloudflare blocks more humans than bots. They see in the dashboard "number of bots blocked" and it's like their brain turns off.
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If you don't also display how many humans were blocked, how they know?
I can literally point to how much information is encoded in our DNA, because it's four bases (so 2 bits per base pair) and ~3.1 billion base pairs. 6.2 gigabits total, or slightly less than 1 gigabyte. A 1 gigabyte LLM isn't going to impress anyone with what it can do. About 99% (depends who you ask) of our DNA is shared with our nearest primates. Like us, they can learn to use touch screens, but also like us they won't find touch screens in their natural environment. Dogs can be taught to drive cars (just about), but again, not natural environment. > I'm still going to deny the premise of your argument, becasue I think we should define intelligence in terms of capabilities. If a system can discover a cure for cancer or solve P vs. NP, it doesn't matter how many FLOPs it took to train. We can define it in either way. I think both are valid, because plenty of people mean each of these two things when discussing AI in particular. As I referenced in the other branch, these submarines sure can swim fast. But at the same time, they have a lot of gaps. This is because some experience needs the real world: just as nine women can't make a baby in one month, a transistor running a million times faster than a synapse can't make a month-long cancer experiment happen in 2.6 seconds. This dependency on data, and that state of the art ML is bad in specifically this way, is why Tesla's self-driving cars, despite having had around a trillion miles of real-world experience today, still come with steering wheels (even at least some of the Cybercabs, despite the big thing of this model supposedly being not needing them, though with Musk and his promises you should only count the Cybercabs when they actually ship and not just press releases).
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Note I used the word knowledge, not information. A random string can also contain 1 gigabyte of information. Imagine an alien that matches your abilities across every domain, but has a 10 billion year training period, something many orders of magnitude more expensive than an LLM. I simply don't believe that alien is less intelligent than you. We also don't expect humans to be competent in every domain. Most humans suck at most things. We will usually call someone intelligent if they excel at solving problems in one or two narrow domains.
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Information is an upper bound on knowledge. > 10 billion year training period, something many orders of magnitude more expensive than an LLM. I'm saying both definitions are valid definitions, they both point to important and different things: skill now, vs. how hard it is to get new skills. Some would describe it as "crystallised intelligence vs fluid intelligence". I think it's important that any arguments are over the thing in dispute, not the label for that thing. Don't mistake the map for the territory. Anyone who says "AI is stupid" by the first definition, what it can do, I think is making an error: they are already wildly super-human. Anyone who says "AI is stupid" by the second definition, how many examples they need, I agree with: there is a lot they are not currently able to learn even though it is easy for us, because the data they would need to do the learning on does not exist at the scale they need. Also note: examples, not years. An alien intelligence whose synapses trigger 10 times faster or slower than mine (or ten million times faster or slower than mine), but who gets as much as I do out of each book or conversation, is my equal by the second definition.
Those are distillations of existing knowledge. They are necessarily behind the status quo. "You can't call this newfangled contraption a computer, because a computer is a person!"
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> They are necessarily behind the status quo. That seems like a really bizarre way to describe a tool that solved an open Millennium Prize Problem. They are, empirically and repeatedly, ahead of the status quo. So if your argument depends on them being behind the status quo, reality has already disproven it multiple times over.
> Those are distillations of existing knowledge. Definitions are "formal statements of the meaning or significance of a word, phrase, idiom, etc" ( https://www.dictionary.com/browse/definition ) > They are necessarily behind the status quo. The existing state or condition would be what is written in the dictionary, not whatever personal definitions you've constructed. > "You can't call this newfangled contraption a computer, because a computer is a person!" Seems like a straw man. A computer is not a mammal, no matter how much you twist a set of definitions.
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> A computer is not a mammal, no matter how much you twist a set of definitions. I’m not the person you replied to, but I believe they’re referring to the occupation of “computer”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) So yes, at one time all computers were mammals. The people who write dictionaries generally take a descriptivist approach, that’s why slang terms enter the dictionary after they start to become popular. The state of the art of human knowledge would be another step ahead of the common use of any language.
I've heard many variants; Paris in an earlier war, too. I try to keep an open mind about propaganda fooling me today; the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.
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In the past, there were not the avenues of finding alternate sources for news. While those avenues are present today, it also allows for additional sources for propaganda. So are we any better today or not???
Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion (pirateface.co)
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I claimed the "diner06" handle on Pirate Face. Where Hugging Face AI models never die, and are immortalized as torrents. Claim yours: https://pirateface.co/claim?ref=diner06
Yeah, orthogonalisation is a special case of a rank-1 LoRA.
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I don’t think this is true.
Well, for a torrent to stay healthy, users have to seed after download, so it can't possibly have the same UX as a standard browser file download unless you want to either kill the ecosystem or hide from the user what is consuming upload bandwidth. That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
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> I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable. Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.
Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business (toolguyd.com)
I considered their manual mill when I first wanted to get into CNC but then realized that a manual mill makes no sense for anything really anymore. Anything short of a CNC is a waste of time.
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There's a lot to be said for a manual approach for certain tasks. For an extreme example of partisanship on this, see the Youtube channel "Inheritance Machining"
What is the best replacement for hobbyists?
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Taig maybe? https://taigtools.com/ (ob. discl., I work for a hobbyist CNC company, but we don't offer a 4th axis or lathe)
Yes, I agree that China can copy Sherline’s IP and it’s a form of theft. An estimated 70-80% of the parts can probably be made in China. If you would like a breakdown I can provide it. Sherline, for example, specifies spindle nose runout of 0.0005 inch or less and spindle end play around 0.0002 inch or less, using two 20-mm ball bearings with adjustable preload. That’s only about 13 µm runout. A Chinese factory can absolutely manufacture that. Manufacturers such as SIEG took conventional lathe architecture and mass-produced it. There is nothing original going on there lots of copying
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This isn't "clones/copying," but rather "Chinese people making things." It isn't like they're stealing our exclusive "lathe technology." They're just making lathes. It's certainly destructive to local companies, but that's what tariffs are for. If you think we should be making lathes, then throw tariffs on countries that make them cheaper. If that just moves the pressure to a consumer who still can't afford local lathes, stop handing free money to stockholders and real estate owners and start handing it to people who buy things.
If you can quote spindle runout, you know perfectly well that there's no meaningful IP in this market segment. That would have been achievable by any number of manufacturers a hundred years ago. It's a pure manufacturing cost play to make something precise enough, rigid enough, and light enough[0] while being inexpensive enough for the market segment it's aimed at. Is it a bummer that a US manufacturer went out of business trying to make money at that play? Yes. Is there anything nefarious going on with IP theft? Absolutely not. [0] This is being sold to customers who don't hire riggers to move their machines.
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how does a small US manufacturer compete when a foreign producer can duplicate 70–80% of the functional product at a fraction of the cost?
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They can't. But how is that unfair? It's literally a choice we made. And it's the one thing that unites every mainstream politician against Trump - they can't agree on tons of stuff, other than that we definitely should not be using tariffs to defend local manufacturers against Chinese (or any other) imports. I've been assured that those jobs are "not coming back." Well, big surprise - they're also not going to stop disappearing.
Everything. If you are a builder, there is no sane way to bid on contracts with such hugely variable COGS. And how the HELL do you even attempt to fix the US housing supply if you are tariffing Canadian lumber? You can't.
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- US imports 20% of its lumber from Canada vs. 70% local lumber. - Raw lumber costs are about 1% of the price of a house in California. - Lumber prices were much much higher during the pandemic and are actually not that high right now: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber (it's at 9 months low and cheaper than in 2018).
As for the housing... stop using lumber maybe? Us Europeans build houses out of bricks and mortar or outright concrete. Lumber framing only makes sense if you want something dirt cheap (and yet, US matchsticks and cardboard houses go for millions of dollars?!) or something that needs to be earthquake resilient and affordable.
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What is the deal with europeans who have zero knowledge of construction having a weird grudge against wood framing?
Some people want to have an experience with their printer. Some people want it to be an appliance. If you wanted an appliance, and got an experience , you're going to be disappointed. For people who genuinely wanted the experience of exploring 3D printers , like yourself, I'm very happy that those people got that experience. For myself, just as I want to print documents and not have adventures with inkjet printers, I want to make things and not have adventures with 3D printers . Which is why I have no plans to own a 3D printer.
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My Elegoo Centauri Carbon and Flashforge AD5X have been pretty much plug in, load filament, calibrate/configure for that filament, print. It or a similar printer (CoreXY, enclosed if you're going to print filaments which warrant that) from a brand w/ a good reputation should work as well.
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