Hacker News Reader

johnhamlinon Show HN: Bhvr, a Bun and Hono and Vite and React Starter

I had the same reaction to Hono, but now see it has 23k+ stars on GitHub. Learn about a new JS framework everyday!

johnhamlinon It is as if you were on your phone

Love this. It’s the Zen TV Experiment for the 21st Century. https://adam.nz/zen-tv-experiment

johnhamlinon A new phase of matter: Physicists show non-Abelian anyons in quantum processor

Guerrilla marketing for Constellation on Apple+?

johnhamlinon Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

I really want to love this. I’ve been asking for something like it for years. I feel like I’d also need a low-mounted popsocket, or I can already feel my pinkies breaking from the weight supporting this.

johnhamlinon [dead]

“ The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland. This promises a smooth Linux desktop experience on Apple hardware similar to macOS.”

johnhamlinon Travle: A daily game – get between countries in as few guesses as possible

Love this! Another idea for hard mode would be requiring you to guess a contiguous series of countries.

johnhamlinon The CRISPR Era Is Here

https://archive.is/WjgXK

johnhamlinon The CRISPR Era Is Here

In the trial, 29 of 30 eligible patients with sickle-cell disease went from multiple pain crises every year to zero in 12 months following treatment.

The results are so astounding that this therapy, from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, became the first CRISPR medicine ever approved, with U.K. regulators giving the green light earlier this month; the FDA appears prepared to follow suit in the next two weeks.

johnhamlinon Firing Sam Altman reorders the AI race

“Internal fighting over the direction of the company’s nonprofit versus for-profit statuses, along with Altman’s influence in comparison to others like chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who is part of a group at the firm that believes AI can pose a risk to humanity, contributed to the drama, journalist Kara Swisher tweeted.”

johnhamlinon The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget

Ted Chiang predicted this in The New Yorker [1] in February in an article that shaped my thinking about what LLMs are capable of achieving in the near future. Chiang compared the summaries LLMs synthesize to a lossy compression algorithm for the internet.

"There is very little information available about OpenAI’s forthcoming successor to ChatGPT, GPT-4. But I’m going to make a prediction: when assembling the vast amount of text used to train GPT-4, the people at OpenAI will have made every effort to exclude material generated by ChatGPT or any other large language model. If this turns out to be the case, it will serve as unintentional confirmation that the analogy between large language models and lossy compression is useful. Repeatedly resaving a jpeg creates more compression artifacts, because more information is lost every time. It’s the digital equivalent of repeatedly making photocopies of photocopies in the old days. The image quality only gets worse.

Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. If the output of ChatGPT isn’t good enough for GPT-4, we might take that as an indicator that it’s not good enough for us, either. Conversely, if a model starts generating text so good that it can be used to train new models, then that should give us confidence in the quality of that text. (I suspect that such an outcome would require a major breakthrough in the techniques used to build these models.) If and when we start seeing models producing output that’s as good as their input, then the analogy of lossy compression will no longer be applicable."

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

johnhamlinon The 88x31 GIF Collection

Did you find this link at the bottom of the blog that leaked TSA no fly list? Because that’s how I found the same site today. https://maia.crimew.gay/