Hacker News Reader

digbybkon Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide

I think the Future is a massively under appreciated album.

digbybkon The occult technology of the rollercoaster

> Rollercoasters and psychedelics can be a great pairing

Reading this sentence made my arms tingle with anxiety.

digbybkon Ozempic is changing people's skin, say plastic surgeons

Coffee being the only exception.

digbybkon On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is prohibited

I was disappointed when I realized that Nextdoor was an even worse place than other social media platforms. In principle it should be like FPF. Is it the moderation or does FPF work because Vermont is so sparsely populated and homogeneous?

digbybkon "Superintelligence" 10 years later

Is that dissonance or shows that the concept is generally applicable? Human inventions can be misaligned with human values. The more powerful the invention, the more damage it can do if it is misaligned. The corporation is a powerful invention. Super intelligence is the most powerful invention imaginable.

digbybkon Ask HN: How to pivot to a Machine Learning engineer?

Can you elaborate? How are the ethics different from any role in tech?

digbybkon Priced out of home ownership

> This is a problem of underutilisation in my view. Too many properties are being used as investments and not as a primary residence.

I hear this argument a lot and always wonder if the causal direction is flipped: people use housing as an investment because it’s scarce, not that it’s scarce because it’s used as an investment. If there weren’t so many restrictions on building, the supply would grow to meet the demand and parking your money in property wouldn’t be such a hot idea.

digbybkon An FDA approved device offers a new treatment for tinnitus

I mostly notice it only when I meditate. I also notice that my nose hurts.

digbybkon US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in 'climate time bomb'

Repair and widening are different things. When you say we're nowhere near saturating our landmass with people, are you thinking of the landmass of the entire country or the areas within an hour commute or less of a major population center? That's where the vast majority of people live, and that landmass is pretty saturated.

digbybkon What if I’m wrong? (2023)

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad.

I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

digbybkon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

What’s the relative likelihood that a waymo car will hit a cyclist or pedestrian vs a human operated car? Unfortunately for us cyclists, people are hit by human drivers every day.

digbybkon A man who used music to try to lure aliens to earth (2020)

You’re certainly not the only two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

digbybkon Read fewer books and feel better about it

I really enjoyed Seveneves.

digbybkon Intel Neural-Chat-7B Model Achieves Top Ranking on LLM Leaderboard

I’m not claiming otherwise here. I’m claiming that it’s not a good test because a human would (almost certainly correctly) also skip past the double feather and answer the likely spirit of the question.

digbybkon Intel Neural-Chat-7B Model Achieves Top Ranking on LLM Leaderboard

I wouldn’t even say it’s failing. Recognizing and correcting obvious errors in speech is a feature not a bug, both in humans and LLMs. Is it more likely that they meant to say feather twice or they mistyped?

digbybkon Machine intelligence (2015)

We have an evolutionary aversion to situations and things that may lead to our deaths. Staying alive is a “terminal goal” for most humans, not an instrumental goal (with the exception of people who seek to commit suicide as you point out, but evolution doesn’t need a 100% success rate). The argument that self preservation is a convergent instrumental goal is a more general statement about goal-seeking agents.

Think of a person with no attachment to his life. He’s not suffering in the way suicidal people are, he’s just indifferent about whether or not he keeps living. But he has a child who he is committed to giving the best life possible. He will act in a way as though he wants to preserve his life. He doesn’t really, but in order to accomplish the goal of giving his child a good life he needs to stay alive.

digbybkon Machine intelligence (2015)

https://youtu.be/ZeecOKBus3Q

Basically, any sufficiently advanced agent will have “prevent anyone from switching me off” as an instrumental goal. And any sufficiently advanced intelligence will come up with ways of achieving its goals that lesser intelligences can’t predict. Taking steps to prevent itself from being turned off could be its first order of business, not necessarily only as the human is about to hit the off switch.

While we can’t predict what a greater intelligence would come up with, the obvious thing is social engineering. Remember that one of the factors that lead to the Jan 6th attack on the capital was that a random text generating agent named “Q” (we know it was a human because it was before generative AI was any good) convinced thousands of people that Democrats are running a child sex cult. I doubt whoever was behind it expected it to be that successful, but a greater intelligence possibly could have predicted the outcome, and made it even more successful. We don’t know the extent to which we can be manipulated because it’s only ever been human intelligences doing the manipulating.

digbybkon Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his possible return

> It should be obvious: power. But that also means that it doesn't matter what they say, because they'll lie to conceal that this was really a power play, driven by petty looking rivalries.

Am I the only one who finds these kinds of explanations unconvincing? I don't think anyone knows precisely what was going through Sutskever's mind on Friday, but whenever the best explanation people have for an event is that an obviously very smart person suddenly became very stupid, it gives me the feeling that we don't have all the information.

digbybkon Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

> The only people who truly believe this AI safety stuff are those with no technical knowledge or expertise.

This is a demonstrably false claim that gets repeated over and over. 2 out of 3 Turing Award recipients for work in AI are people who talk about AI safety, and even existential risk. There are many more. It may actually be BS but it’s simply false to say that it’s based on technical ignorance. The question I have is why is this claim made over and over when it is so easily seen to be untrue?

digbybkon I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions

Money and power is still not a satisfying explanation. If everything had gone according to plan, how would be have ended up with more money and power?

digbybkon Fear that AI could one day destroy humanity may have led to Sam Altman's ouster

https://aisafety.info/

digbybkon Fear that AI could one day destroy humanity may have led to Sam Altman's ouster

So either doomers are wrong about the technology, or we’re doomed. There’s no universe where doom is possible but for policy decisions and we aren’t doomed.

digbybkon Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

Our future selves will always have more information than our present selves, so we should let them make the decision whenever possible.

digbybkon Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope

This reminds me or the joke where an economist refuses to look down when told that there’s a $20 bill on the ground: “if there was really $20 on the ground, someone would have picked it up already”.

Seriously though, we’re just getting started studying it, how can we know whether or not this stuff works? There’s a lot of positive anecdotal evidence. We’re not talking about marijuana, and no one ever expected it to solve every medical problem. That particular substance has done a lot of good with people experiencing discomfort, like cancer patients and the elderly, including members of my family.

digbybkon Extreme parkour with legged robots

Iirc the robots are the equivalent to land mines, continuing to cause harm after the war is over. That episode felt very plausible and horrifying.

digbybkon Most demographers now predict that human population will plateau

There’s a distinction between pleasure and happiness.

- why cultivate friendships, have experiences like travel, build hobbies and skills that will give you joy all through your life?

For many people, the time and financial cost of children means delaying or sacrificing all those.

digbybkon LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A”

It is trained to predict tokens but to do that well it needs to develop some internal structure. That structure is mostly opaque but it appears to model the world increasingly well with scale.

digbybkon Lodash just declared issue bankruptcy and closed every issue and open PR

> No FP wrappers. That fad is over. RIP your co-workers if you introduced that headache into your codebase. Definitely not team or human friendly.

Can someone comment on this from the linked tweet? I haven’t been a js dev in a long time. Is functional style dead?

digbybkon iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus

Has the SE gotten bigger? I have an old SE that’s pretty small, I was hoping that when I upgraded I’d still have that option.

digbybkon Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

> The raw materials are fairly cheap, and the production involves heating it to hundreds of degrees centigrade for 24-48 hours

Can you also ELI5 why this seemed like such a hard problem to solve up until now? Was it something hiding in plain site?