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I have a separate - not fully implemented - section for more semi-random aliases, but it revolves around our tendency to use default settings and commonly used tools for generating them. Thus far the only thing I was able to show with it is that it is not uncommon, but no clear proxy for age.. so seems like a dead end.

Not parent, but why/how is not always difficult; actual execution tends to be difficult. There is also a more cynical take, but I try not to engage that on HN.

Thank you for catching this. Will leave original in place.

<< That's just speculations from people online. I don't see any wisdom in that like you do, all I see is just a guessing game from people who think they know an industry when they don't (armchair experts to put it politely).

True, it is just speculation. 'Any' seems to be a strong qualifier. One of the reasons I troll landscape of HN is that some of the thoughts and recommendations expressed here ended up being useful in my life. One still has to apply reason and common sense, but I would not dream of saying it has no ( any ) wisdom.

<< What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot of RAM.

I assume you mean: 'not in isolation'. If so, that statement is true. AMD cards at the very least had parity with nvidia, so it clearly wasn't just a question of ram.

<< The puzzle of their success had way more pieces that made the whole package appealing over many years, and a great timing of the market also helped.

I will be honest. I am biased against nvidia so take the next paragraph for the hate speech that it is.

Nvidia got lucky. CUDA was a big bet that paid off first on crypto and now on ai. Now, we can argue how much of that bet was luck meets preparation, because the bet itself was admittedly a well educated guess.

To your point, without those two waves, nvidia would still likely be battling amd in incremental improvements so the great market timing accounts for majority of its success. I will go as far as to say that we would likely not see a rush to buy 'a100s' and 'AI accellerators' with exception of very niche applications.

<< Intel making underperforming GPUs with a lot of RAM would not guarantee the same outcome at a later time in the market with an already entrenched Nvidia and a completely different landscape.

Underperforming may be the key word here and it is a very broad brush. In what sense are they underperforming and which segment are they intended for? As for ram, it would be kinda silly in current environment to put a new card out with 8gb; I think we can agree on that at least.

<< I'm saying nobody can guarantee the claim of the GP I've replied to,

True, but it is true for just about every aspect of life so as statements go, so it is virtually meaningless as an argument. Best one can do is argue possibilities based on what we do know about the world and the models it tends to follow.

Ahh, but you miss out on the 'cool' aspect embodied by letter X, the underlying meaning that effectively refers to the title of the movie and other things are likely going over my head. Gige prefix does not have the same impact. Alien in fake latin sounds a lot better.

I think you may be either misinterpreting my post or misunderstanding the sequence of events.

What do you think has happened so far?

Your mental model of the world may help me understanding the point you are trying to make.

You are jesting, but there is some wisdom to that post. No reasonable person is suggesting global company changes direction on the basis of one post on the internet, but the advice provided is not without merit. Surely, a company of that size can do some research to see if it is a viable path. In fact, if it does anything right, it should have people like that ready to do appropriate analysis.

I have my thoughts on the matter and cautiously welcomed their move to GPUs ( though admittedly on the basis that we -- consumers -- need more than amd/nvidia duopoly in that space; so I am not exactly unbiased ).

I think the answer is that is not nearly as convenient as original service providers would claim it is. I am in US and we just went through a crazy period of everyone and their mother trying to start their own streaming service. Good portion went under, some consolidated, but the market fragmentation leading to actual content you want to see being spread across multiple services is an annoyance.

I will provide a concrete example. My buddy got into anime and was raving about one specific title so I checked Hulu for it, but Hulu, for some unfathomable reason starts that anime at season 4.. If I want to legally Stream season one, I would need to try the Sony owned anime thing, which I refuse to do for reasons not related to streaming wars. I ended up buying a dvd ( cheap and good enough quality for me ).

And pirates... have everything and, unless you are looking for newest releases, is of superior quality.

I am personally somewhere in between. Language models do allow me to do things I wouldn't have patience to do otherwise ( yesterday chatgpt was actually helpful with hunting down a bug it generated:P ). I think there is some real value here, but I do worry it will not be captured properly.

The idea itself is kinda simple, but kinda hard, because it relies on how the language we use, gives us away.

For example, references we put ( simpsons, star trek, you name it ), language we use ( gee whiz, yeet, gyatt) and that is used to generate an online persona tends to be something of note to our image of self - one can determine to some extent the likely generation from those

The reference itself may not automatically mean much, but it is likely that if it is present in an alias, it had an impact on a younger person ( how many of the new generation jump on an old show? so mr robot would have the exposure range of 2015 to 2019 ). If that hypothesis is true, then one can attempt to guess age if the individual given that work work, because 1) we know what year is now 2) we know when it was made, which allows for some minor inference there.

Naturally, some aliases are more elaborate than others. Some are written backwards and/or reference a popular show or popular sci-fi author. Some are anagrams ( and - I discovered today - require additional datasets to tag properly so that is another thing I will need to dig up from somewhere ). And to complicate things further, some aliases use references that are ambiguous and/or belong in more than one category ( Tesla being one of them ).

The original approach was to just throw everything into LLM and see what it comes up with, but the results were somewhat uneven so I decided to start from scratch and do normal analysis ( language, references, how digits are used and so on - it is still amazing how well that one seems to work ).

Sadly, it is still a work in progress ( I was hoping for a quick project, but I am kinda getting into it ) and I probably won't touch until next weekend since the coming week promises to be challenging.

Unfortunately, this means in your particular alias ended up as:

Alias category is_random length is_anagram generic_signal Loughla Mixed Case 0 7 FALSE FALSE

( remaining fields were empty, basically couldn't put a finger on you:D). If you can provide me with an approximate age, it would help with my testing though:D

edit: This being HN. Vast majority of references are technology related.

So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.

It is kinda interesting. I talked with a less technical member of my extended family over the holidays. Fairly successful guy in his chosen profession ( accounting ). To say he was skeptical is an understatement and he is typically the most pro-corporate shill you can find for a company to save a few bucks. I assumed he would be attempting to extol its virtues with the assumption that lower level work has errors anyway. I was wrong. Sadly, we didn't get to continue down that line since my kid started crying at that moment.

Caught my attention as well. Must be neologism assuming it originated from as a variant of incel, but here focused on deriding people getting their jollies out of the written word ( me:P ). Naturally, I might be wrong. Lets see if the author responds.

Re-training can be done, but, and it is not a small but, models already do exist and can be used locally suggesting that the milk has been spilled for too long at this point. Separately, neutering them effectively lowers their value as opposed to their non-neutered counterparts.

This is a genuinely relevant question given that HN could be easily argued to be social media. For the record, I too am concerned about social media impact and so on ( for good and valid reasons ), but this law does not seem that great at first glance.

Thank you. And I just found out, there is a docker image ready for Unraid. Lets see if it will work for me.

There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.

Birds of feather and all that. I was lucky enough to end up in a class full of kids much smarter than me.

As for LLM replacement for talented teacher,even though I kinda worry that it would be subverted by organizations and various interests intent on stripping anything of value from LLM thus rendering LLMs role as a talented guide/teacher role largely useless, I personally found exploring new subjects even more engrossing than ( at one point in time, following down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia entries on some obscure subject ).

Part of the problem is that this thing would need to be marketed as safe, but safe is staying within rigid parameters that do not allow for a genius level individual to grow. Smart is probably a lot easier so safety features will likely not be triggered that often.

The other problem is that only some kids will take advantage of that mode. Not everyone is inclined to explore like that.

I have no real solution here. My kid is not at the age I need to worry about it yet, but I am slowly starting to plan my approach and I think tuned LLM with heavily restricted digital access will be the initial approach.

<< there should be an app like an 'auto-RAG' that scrapes RSS feeds and URLs,

I am not aware if that exists yet, but the challenge I see with it is rather simple: you get overwhelmed with information really quickly. In other words, you would still need human somewhere in that process to review those scrapes and the quality of that varies widely. For example, even on HN it is not a given a link will be pure gold ( you still want to check if it fits your use case ).

That said, as ideas goes, it sounds like a fun weekend project.

<< That's not the state of today at all, and probably doesn't represent the near or medium future.

Thank you for saying this. I briefly wondered if my particular company is just way behind or particularly dysfunctional and disorganized ( a possibility for sure ). I do agree with you observation on LLMs effectively lowering entry level skill ( yesterday I was able to dissect xml file despite it not being something I could normally do without any prep work and despite mildly unusual - I thought - formatting choices by vendor ). There was still a fair amount of back and forth for what some enthusiast would call 'perfect prompt' and interesting bugs that had to be addressed, but, having seen the daily mess at my company does not exactly make me a full blown evangelist. I see it more as a get to the wrong answer faster. That is the part that concerns me.

<< Yep. I often reflect on some of my career mistakes, especially when evaluating current decisions within the context of a job or interacting with other institutions, and what I wish I'd learnt earlier would be to "read a room".

While I agree and even accept this answer in theory, I have a hard time putting it in practice. Just today it seems I unnecessarily ruffled some executive feathers by pointing out some -- otherwise clear -- issues no one dares to mention and I am wondering now if that was even worthwhile. After all, I am not paid for extra for it. Regardless of the choice made by executives, the only thing that would change is the amount of support work I would do for it.

I know for a fact that 9 out of 10 it is better for me ( and my career ) to stay quiet, but sometimes I just can't stay out of my way.

I did toy with the idea of trying do analysis of HN aliases and keywords. It never went anywhere, because I forgot about it, but a longer weekend is coming:D But yeah, language betrays, who we are in references alone.

Oh, I never considered that:D It is an interesting use of materials, but seems unnecessary. I was thinking about a scenario in which an assailant would attack an actual soft spot in an airport. That did not happen. That is the part that surprises me ( and I am glad I remain surprised ). Then again, you start reading about new and exciting ways of detecting guns and you start wondering if that is basically trying to fight an old war.

<< My wife says it’s a wonder I’m not on the no fly list.

For better or worse, my work almost guarantees that I will be looking for mildly interesting subjects so I am likely on some sort of grey list ( no idea what IC would call it internally ). No 'no fly' list yet, but these days it only takes being extra rude it seems[1] so these days that list is a major inconvenience, but the signal it generates is less useful:D

[1]https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2021/01/15/delta-air-line...

To be honest, I am genuinely surprised an attack never materialized. But then I also remember mentioning my thoughts on the matter to my wife, who was aghast that I would even consider such a scenario. Maybe, on average, people are actually decent and it is people like me, who come up with weird hypotheticals.

It gets worse. In US most of the bigger corps institute some sort of means to authenticate you via cellphone, which means that if you want to be remote, phone is effectively a necessity ( which one usually does ). Only a year ago, it was still possible to avoid having to have a cell ( although that meant you had to be in person -- an interesting trade off in itself ).

Anyway, I hate the now.

Manna was fairly eye-opening ( and you can see some parallels to today's LLMs to me. I will admit that I read it without knowing much about the author way back when and being fairly amazed at well he knew human nature and likely course that invention would take.

What a time to be alive, I read it the opening fully expecting to see an open source automated trashcan that takes itself to the curb each Monday. I was disappointed to find out it is about an actual garbage collection algorithm.

I think you have a very valid point here. Perception of the issue will likely carry the day eventually. Sadly, I am not the person to come up with a good slogan or decent marketing campaign. I just have rather strong feelings on the matter and am somewhat surprised how many people do not see the long term benefit.

It is interesting and paints rather annoying future once those are cheaper. I am glad this research is conducted, but I think here the measure cannot be technical ( more silly guardrails in software.. or even blobs in hardware ).

What we need is a clear indication of who is to blame when a bad decision is made? I would argue, just like with a weapon, that the person giving/writing instructions is, but I am sure there will be interesting edge cases that do not yet account for dead man's switch and the like.

edit: On the other side of the coin, it is hard not to get excited ( 10k for a flamethrower robot seems like a steal even if I end up on a list somewhere ).

There is no reason to make too snarky. The reality is the propaganda machine in US is really well oiled.