billiam

Not sure why everyone thinks local language processing, generation and voice synthesis has anything to do with privacy. Apple's business model has supported their relatively pro-privacy approach (along with how bad they are at a lot of cloud services) but doing anything useful with a 30B token LLM stored on your machine is still going to require the Internet, and your AI Personal Assistant will be just as tracked and cracked as you are today.

Is the (moderate) improvement in Dx and writing one check worth the increased costs? In the case of blob storage, aren't most Vercel customers paying Cloudflare already?

Plug for Lapham Quarterly, a great source of short essays and artifacts of culture and history.

I think the fact that this remains an unwritten story is shameful for those of us that love sports. The Sacklers needed doctors to legitimize their crimes, and the sports betting industry has coopted governments and also the sports journalism industry to legitimize theirs.

It appears that they used Webpack, which I found interesting given other alternatives.

Very much so. Sea level has actually been falling on the coast of Greenland, for example, due to the gravitational effect of ice melting along with crustal rebound. But all that water has to go somewhere, and along low lying coastal areas like Florida, it will rise a lot.

This one is in the tl;dr HN uninformed expert Hall of Fame. Did you click even one level down? NIST is a standards organization whose usually very careful work is to provide frameworks for people to make products, make business decisions, and create entire industries. It's not a single Github repo you can clone or a blog post can can dissect. The companies, researchers, and organizations that will use this framework understand it and will I am sure be able to use it and suggest areas of improvement.

I have felt this train rumbling down the tracks since GPT-3 hit. He compares peak LLM to what has happened with SEO, but that doesn't really capture it. Gaming the Google algorithm has made the discovery of human-generated content more difficult, but what happens when most of the content to be found by LLM-powered search engines is itself generated by LLMs? The Internet after 2022 rapidly becomes garbage and everything we do on it becomes a dark pattern we have no control of. The analogy: what if all the petroleum in the ground instantly turned into shit? You could still burn it, but it wouldn't do much useful work, and would smell so bad no one would want to use it.

Geologist here (by training). I know HN readers are instant experts on everything, except reading the entire article I guess. All the geoengineering suggestions are amusing, but there is nothing we can do about the (hypothetical) stress buildup on the Cascadia Fault. There are lots of ways to measure stress and determine which segments of a fault are locked, this direct observation of a single seep being one very anecdotal example. We have instrumented and observed the hell out of other faults for decades, and we have increased our ability to predict earthquakes by ~0%.

A lot of it is about the unique culture of this city, which has been both gleaming boomtown and garbage-strewn opium den since, oh 1848. It's always been a place where you do your own thing on the street and no one bothers you, which is why thousands die of overdoses while people walk around them without getting their Allbirds dirty. We need to take better care of each other.

This is nice to see, but it worth pointing out that it is years overdue. Mozilla dragged its feet for years about Tracking Protection and cookies in general, coming up with halfway measures while continuing to serve the needs of advertisers that had a lot of influence on the company. The end state of Total Cookie Protection was clear from the beginning. It is of course not easy to change the advertising based model, but it's not like Firefox is really more than an influencer of Google and Apple, its market share has all but disappeared. No, the motivation to take seven years to get to TCP was all about money, including big salaries and bonuses for Mozilla executives.

Amazing project, one that will seemingly go on for the foreseeable future. This is quite a labor of love, and it shows. It is very interesting to see the bifuracted comments: either but why (these are the people, probably mostly younger who just don't see the point) or PalmOS-based were so cool (cleaner, simpler, etc). I think Dmitri's project makes clear that there was a huge difference between the experience of PalmOS as products and the way they were created as software and hardware. Yes, many of the shortcuts and hacky looking design decisions taken 20+ years ago seem inexplicable today. Many were made based on the constraints of the time (supply chain, expertise on the team, bloodymindedness, etc) but ultimately the biggest driver was a great PDA experience, more a portable, always on digital replacement for paper that could do several things well, rather than everything you could imagine. Great ideas for power management, sophisticated kernel not so much.

>our climate would be back to 2010, which is hardy a significant change.

Uh, no. It is quite significant, and a mountain of evidence says that the climate changes from concentrations in the last decade are very significant. You appear to be a denier of anthropogenic climate change who is willing to make silly straw men arguments.

Sorry, but this is a reductionist argument. There are any number of things that could disappear without mall visitors knowing about it (NOAA, Earth's magnetic field, etc) but that doesn't mean they are not important for researchers, students, and others all over the world.

The blog post(1) from Stephen Wolfram is epic and has a lot of implications for how science and engineering is going to get done in the future. Tl;dr he seems willing to let ChatGPT shape how people will interact with his computational language and the data it unlocks. He genuinely doesn't seem to know where it will go but makes the case for Wolfram Language being the language that ChatGPT uses to compute a lot of things. But I think it more likely ChatGPT will make his natural interface to Wolfram (Wolfram|Alpha) quickly obsolete and end up modifying or rewriting Wolfram Language so it can use it more effectively. He makes the case that "true" AI is going to be possible with this combination of neural net-based "talking machines" like ChatGPT and languages like Wolfram. I remain skeptical, but it might shape human research for years to come.

1. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its...

It almost certainly won't take the form of a text format. Impersonating a chatbot or a search engine GUI is just the fastest way for OpenAI to accumulate a few hundred million users, to leave the competition for user data and metadata behind.

All in all, a pretty good digital adaptation. The movie was shear joy to watch.

"And such an exciting, frightening shift is a "double-edged sword," Chen said, envisioning using AGI to tackle climate change, for example, but also warning that it is a tool that we want to be as "steerable as possible."

Quite revealing as well as ridiculous. We are circling the drain as a species not because of our intelligence but our stupidity, our unwillingness to learn and change. Clever use of transformers to speed up and improve the quality of output of LLMs is not intelligence, and tackling climate change is not the job for models that tell us what they think we want to hear.

In 100 years we will look back on the widespread criminalization of poverty and immigration along with many other crimes like sex crimes and even murder as something that needs to be treated, not simply punished.

What you say is true, but the point remains that the limits imposed by the government only work if some depositors (large ones) bear some risk of losing their deposits. The limits may simply be moved up to $2 million or $5 million for certain kinds of banks, but the rules imposed by VCs and related investors require companies to concentrate all their business with one bank; this increases risk and needs to be outlawed (this kind of sweetheart deal is one of the reasons the bad managers at SVB piled up so many deposits). The VCs share a good deal of the blame here. There needs to be some incentive for multimillion dollar depositors to both evaluate risk and to be able to reduce it.

I think it shows how calcified standardized tests have become. We will have to revisit all of them, and change many things about how they work, or they will be increasingly useless.

This is a good salad of truth, but I think it misses the point. VR is not going to happen for a long time, but this high status product is mostly about demonstrating the possibilities of AR, which is happening all around us with existing technologies. Apple has concluded that it will be worth it to demonstrate how information superiority and affordance will work in a $3k headset before the lightweight glasses become feasible. The applications for this product (sports, research, conferencing, gaming, etc) won't depend on real world interaction.

I don't think you got the point of this article. Maybe read it again?

I think the real problem is that we have rigged our the nominally democratic but mostly capitalist system to favor wealth accumulation above all else, and have given most people a crappy deal: provide some incentives (in the tax code and local laws) for most people to use their home as their primary wealth repository as long as they don't make a peep about the essentially untaxed wealth of rich people and corporations. Taxing income instead of wealth (except for homes, which is most of us) is really the way modern society is broken, and until we address it we will continue to pull away from each other.

Tl;dr but it seems like this movement says that English was native before the Norman invasions. Whut. There are no native tongues, and the languages of the Picts, Welsh, Irish, Celts, Romans, Saxons and others shaped what was being spoken on fair Albion long before the Normans showed up.

Reminds me of riding in a cab once in Turkey with a guy speaking Armenian on the phone. The Turkish driver was prejudiced against Armenians and ordered us out of the cab in angry Turkish, which I did not speak. My companion laughed and told me the phrase he used to tell us to get out was Armenian.

I regenerated a ChatGPT response with the same prompt and got some totally made up quotes from the (real) FTC Chair. Just remember, it's a talking machine, not an intelligent one.

FTC Warns Companies to Be Careful of Promises Using "AI"

Washington, D.C. - The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is warning companies to be careful of making deceptive or misleading promises regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their products or services.

As the use of AI becomes increasingly prevalent in a wide range of industries, companies may be tempted to tout their use of the technology as a selling point. However, the FTC cautions that such claims must be substantiated and truthful, and not likely to mislead consumers.

"The use of AI can bring significant benefits to consumers, but it is important that companies are transparent and truthful about the capabilities of their products and services," said FTC Chair Lina Khan. "Claims that are unsubstantiated or misleading can harm consumers and undermine trust in the marketplace."

The FTC has issued guidance to help companies understand their obligations under the law when making claims about the use of AI. Among other things, the guidance advises companies to ensure that any claims about the capabilities of their AI systems are backed up by sound science and evidence.

The FTC also warns against making claims that suggest AI can perform tasks that it cannot. For example, a company cannot claim that its AI system can accurately diagnose a medical condition if it has not been adequately tested and validated for that purpose.

Finally, the FTC cautions that companies must be transparent about how they use consumer data in their AI systems. Consumers have a right to know what data is being collected, how it is being used, and how it is being protected.

"AI has the potential to transform many aspects of our lives, but companies must use it responsibly and ethically," said Khan. "The FTC will continue to monitor the marketplace and take action against companies that deceive or mislead consumers."

The FTC's guidance on the use of AI can be found on its website at www.ftc.gov.

Contact: FTC Office of Public Affairs Phone: 202-326-2180

The other issue here in SF and near the coast is that for older, poorly insulated homes and those with high ceilings (mine are 12 feet), the real problem with an air heat pump is how slow it is to heat the volume. Unless you want to pay to keep your house warm 24-7 it will take an hour to warm up the whole house. I would love to kick my 10 year old forced air gas furnace to the curb, but I don't see how, even if I get solar. Contractors are charging a fortune for installing heat pumps these days too.

His embrace of uniformitarianism was based on traveling across South America, a fantastic place to observe it. The catastrophists that Lyell was fighting made most of their observations in Europe and Scandanavia, where there was lots of evidence for (in geological terms) sudden changes. More importantly, the ideas of gradual, continual geological evolution that he observed so carefully made it possible for him to imagine the same processes happening in the evolution of living things.

In fact there's a potent new theory(1) that human consciousness (and probably all mammalian "consciousness") is just a memory system involving some form of lossy compression. Your sense of awareness happens ~20-50 ms after the memory is created. A lot of life is buffering and filtering, and reading that lossy record is very much who we are. Einstein's brain must have been amazing at throwing away information about the natural world.

(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36178498/

Powerful for what? To use Chiang's analogy, do you think that an LLM trained on Web content will actually derive the rules of arithmetic, physics, etc. I think it is more likely that in decade or more a majority of Internet content will be generated by machine and search engines will do a great job of indexing increasingly meaningless information.