nkurz

I think the big players are basing their projections on taking over a majority of the market. The only way they are going to turn a profit is if they scale to something larger than would be possible for multiple players.

Also, there is the idea that the first company to be able to successfully turn their on technology toward self-improvement is going to get such a quick boost that no one else can catch up before they take over the market.

But I could be wrong. Do you see a stable situation with multiple players at the scale they are betting on achieving?

> NO The answer to the question, “Can I replace wax paper with parchment paper in the kitchen?” In fact, doing so might be a great shortcut to starting a fire. See, silicone material is designed in such a way that resists heat, which makes it perfect for baking; wax paper, also known as “greaseless paper,” is not. (As the Reynolds website notes, though, there are some cases, though, where wax paper makes sense in the oven—say, at the bottom of a cake pan, below some batter, where it’s not directly exposed to the oven’s heat—but you wouldn’t just want to randomly swap it in because you’re out of parchment paper.) So despite the fact that these materials seem like kitchen doppelgängers, DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS.

> Editor’s note: This post has been clarified to note that there are some use cases for wax paper in the oven, though not as a direct replacement for parchment paper.

The note at the end says that the post has been "clarified", but isn't the base problem that that question is asked backwards? The question they should be asking, and indeed the question they are answering is "Can I replace parchment paper with wax paper", and answer is indeed that with rare exceptions this would lead to disaster.

But the question as quoted (but not answered) is "Can I replace wax paper with parchment paper in the kitchen?" Which is a question rarely asked, but less obvious. My guess would be that in almost every case you can indeed replace wax paper with parchment paper, because to a first approximation wax paper is always a disaster in the kitchen.

Separately, I'll add that despite being quite interested in this topic, and quite passionate in my love for parchment paper and my hatred for wax paper, I found this article to be really painful to read. What terrible stylistic choices! Are there people out there who prefer this style of ADHD vomit in the articles they choose to read?

> The Bulletin calls her Miss Swindell. The Calgary Daily Herald, in a transcription of its April 30 coverage preserved on her WikiTree profile, calls her Miss Swindells, with the s, which is also how the cemetery register and the city directory have her. The Vulcan Advocate, on May 12, calls her “Miss May Windell,” which loses her a whole syllable.

Hmm, I count Swindells and Windell as both having two syllables. Also, LLM's are notoriously poor at counting syllables. I hate that I'm suspicious, but it does make me suspicious. Or am I the one unable to count syllables?

I feel even a "high junk" rating for debt issued by an LLM company is far too generous. A bond rated "BB" by S&P would be typical of the safest of the junk bonds. Historically, such bonds have about a 10% risk of default over 10 years: https://investmentgrade.com/bond-ratings/

While I'm willing to believe that Anthropic common stock might somehow be a reasonable investment because it might go "to the moon", it seems obvious that this is a high-risk bet. This is shaping up to be a winner-take-all industry. Does anyone really think there is a 90% chance that Anthropic will be that winner?

If you thought there really was only a 10% chance that they'd fail to be in business in a decade, why wouldn't you just buy their common stock and hope for a 100x return? How do the rating agencies justify this degree of confidence in Anthropic's ability to repay these debts? Or do I somehow misunderstand what these ratings mean?

Hmm. I think both of you are both right and wrong!

That is, I claim that while it is no faster to execute a comparison against zero, it still can be faster to finish a loop at zero. This is because internal to the processor, the comparison and the branch are two separate ops. The comparison essentially does an arithmetic operation that sets a flag but throws away the result, and then the branch acts on it.

But if you finish at zero, the flag you are using is already set by the decrement, so no additional comparison op is necessary. Now normally this doesn't matter, since the processor is multiscalar with sufficient execution ports to fit in an extra comparison with no increase in total cycles spent. But in a tiny and highly optimized loop, occasionally you can get about 20% gain from having one fewer op to execute.

Getting this to actually happen can be complicated because modern processors do op-fusion that can "fuse" the CMP and branch back into something that can be executed on a single port. But DEC-JNZ can be fused too, which still gives it an advantage. More details on this here: https://chipswiki.org/Macro-operation_fusion

Now does anyone want to finish the "ground speed readout" routine (https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-blackbird-pilot-tells-...) by pointing out actually how with modern processors I'm actually wrong too?

Neat result, and good writeup! I don't have time to compare them, but another resource you might look at is Daniel Lemire's "Fast Division": https://github.com/lemire/fast_division

If you've come up with something better, I'd encourage you to contact Daniel and see if he's interested in helping you write it up into a paper. He's friendly, and may be better positioned to get the optimizations into mainstream compilers.

> Oh, deer hunting season... when half my team is already on v̶a̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ strike.

Having grown up somewhere where about half the school teachers took the week off for deer hunting, I'm pleasantly surprised that there exist places where this might still be the case even for tech workers. Would I be guessing right that you are describing somewhere in Wisconsin?

This might be the wrong question, but are there reasonable tests for whether a home distilled beverage contains unacceptable levels of methanol?

If such tests exist, it would seem like they could go a long way to increasing the safety of home distilling. If no such test is possible, maybe it makes sense to regulate very tightly?

Approximately the opposite. There's a "second chance" pool that automatically reinserts worthy stories into the queue as if they had been resubmitted. So rather than being moderated out and then released, this one was consciously selected for re-inclusion. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

> I don't know if the author of this post had any medical credentials.

In his defense, this is written on his personal blog where (quite possibly) many readers already have some reason to trust his advice. And while I'm not sure what counts as appropriate credentials, on his linked HN bio (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bookofjoe) he claims to be a "Retired (38 years in practice) neurosurgical anesthesiologist". He also links to a lot of Google Scholar papers on medical topics for which he is a co-author.

(Oops, beaten by Dan, but I'll leave it up anyway. While I agree with Dan that you might have phrased it a bit better, I did think it was a fair question.)

Sure, I think the rebuttal is that while your numbers are correct (and possibly even more in your favor than you may have guessed) they aren't particularly relevant.

First, the numbers. My searching says that for some particular lake in Nebraska, "Average annual gross lake evaporation ranges from about 48 inches to 54 inches". Let's call it 4 feet per year, which means 4 acre-feet of water evaporates per acre per year. Trusting some numbers someone gave in a comment earlier, the data center in question used about 40 acre-feet per year. So 10 acres of lake would evaporate about the same rate as the data center. At a very rough guess, there are something like 200,000 acres of non-seasonal lakes in Nebraska, so this is indeed a tiny percentage.

Next, the relevance. The lakes are more or less in a steady state. But if you were actually to double the evaporation rate for a 10 acre lake, you might quickly end up with a muddy pit instead of a lake. The fish would be gone, and the users of that lake would have good reason to complain. If lake was 10 times larger, so that you were only increasing the evaporation by 10%, over time you'd still probably have a major effect on the shoreline and any infrastructure there. What used to be a useable pier might look over a mud flat rather than the water, and launching a boat would be impossible until you built a new one.

But the real issue is that water use isn't actually fungible. Water continuing to evaporate from a lake at the rate it always has definitionally doesn't make people's life worse than it was. But suddenly pumping of the same amount of groundwater might be really bad for the neighbors who previously were using the same water to irrigate their fields. And trying to double the output of a small municipal water system might (at least in the short term) make things much harder for all the existing users on the system. This doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be done, but it's a harm that should be considered.

That's my good faith attempt to answer you. In return, I have a quick research question that I think is essential to understanding whether or not data center water usage is a big deal or not, and that I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments: Where is this water for these new data centers coming from? Is it from new wells they drill? Existing irrigation wells they buy and repurpose? From the local municipal water supply? Rainwater collection? Diverting a nearby river?

I feel like there's no way to answer the question of whether data center water usage matters without considering the actual local impact, and no way of determining the impact without considering the specifics of the source. But somehow I haven't seen any mention of this on either side of the debate.

I think your confidence is likely misplaced, but I vouched for your comment to revive it from the dead because you expressed your opinion clearly and with examples.

To the flaggers: flag comments that you think violate the rules, but don't flag something just because you strongly disagree with the claim it makes.

Ah, I had forgotten about that extra level of confusion! That does explain the difference in conversion.

I didn't vote, but my guess would be that it's because "aphantasia" (the inability to visualize images) is a popular topic on this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia. Some people see images in their head, and others (possibly overrepresented here) simply don't. My guess would be that a comment that starts by assuming everyone sees images in their heads was considered misleading and simplistic.

Umm, no? A liter is slightly larger than a quart, so 10 quarts is about 9.5L.

For reference, did you mess this up yourself or did it require AI?

No memory, but searching says it was Lewis Carroll in Photography Extraordinary, published in 1885:

  The Milk-and-Water School 
  Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
  Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
  Disfigured, I should be less fair.

  She was unwise, I may say blind;
  Once she was lovingly inclined;
  Some circumstance has changed her mind.


  The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School 
  Well! so my offer was no go!
  She might do worse, I told her so;
  She was a fool to answer "No".

  However, things are as they stood;
  Nor would I have her if I could,
  For there are plenty more as good.


  The Spasmodic or German School 
  Firebrands and Daggers! hope hath fled!
  To atoms dash the doubly dead!
  My brain is fire--my heart is lead!

  Her soul is flint, and what am I?
  Scorch'd by her fierce, relentless eye,
  Nothingness is my destiny!

https://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/carol47.pdf

Hi Bryan,

I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?

In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...

What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?

It's the odd North American English "abbreviation" for a "prescription medicine". Where a "prescription medicine" is one that cannot be bought directly by a consumer and instead requires a medical professional to prescribe it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_prescription

There doesn't seem to be agreement as to exactly what one is, with several definitions already appearing in the comments here. Do you agree with one of them and think everyone else is wrong? Or do you have yet another standard definition that we should all be using?

My problem with the article was that "patch" doesn't seem to add any useful information. Unless he was using a restrictive definition intending to exclude things like crossover cables (which still work), he could have just as well said "transfer files over a blue Ethernet cable" with equal precision.

If he meant to say that at this point in time "you can use _any_ ethernet cable to transfer files directly between two computers", I think it would have been better to say that rather than appearing to add a restriction on the type of cable required.

It would be nice if this article defined a "ethernet patch cable". I think he's just using "patch" as a slang term for a short cable and it actually works with any length of standard cable, but I'm not certain.

Traditionally (pre-2000?), one had to use a special "crossover cable" to do direct connections like this, but apparently modern Gigabit ethernet adapters are able to detect this situation automatically?

> You can interrogate the LLM. You can ask it all sorts of things. Tell it to justify its decisions. Tell it to give you supporting evidence. Tell it to give you options. Tell it to explain things in detail.

Hopefully you realize that it's not actually introspecting into its previous thought process, and instead it is just making up a plausible after-the-fact explanation that matches the format of similar explanations found in its training set?

I too often find these explanations enlightening, but please don't forget that you need to read all such responses as those of a pathologically lying psychopath desparate to trick you, not as a trusted expert who actually understands its internals.

Yes, I think this is correct. The money is for hiring researchers and running a lab, not just the salary for an individual. And I think this might be for a multi-year time frame, and not just a single year.

I have a friend who is participating in this, and at one point he told me the numbers. My recollection is that maybe he said they were offering $2M CDN per year for 5 years? Or maybe it was $1M CDN for each of the next 5 years, with an option to renew for 5 more?

And I think there was something about a hardware budget, but I don't recall if that was included in the numbers are separate. In any case, while they are offering competitive salaries for Canada, the money offered is definitely not all going for the salary of just the recruited academics.

I think you are wrong about this. My belief is that that most states use "conventional" gasoline, a substantial subset require the same "reformulated" gasoline, and a handful only allow the sale of "boutique" formulations in all or some of their counties.

Here's a list of the states that require reformulated: https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/reformulated-gasoline

And here's a shorter list of those with areas requiring boutique formulations: https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/state-fuels

My belief is that all the rest only require the basic federal standard, which results in a map like this with a lot of states in gray: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67464

But if I'm wrong, I'd love to be corrected. What do you have for sources that support your assertion that "every state has their own gas"?

It does feel a bit sloppy, but overall it's a decent article and I think everything it claims is accurate.

The thing I learned that surprised me was in the fine print of the one of the sample labels. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I hadn't realized that there was such as thing as Taiwanese grown cacao! https://damecacao.com/cacao-plantations-taiwan/

> I have a place in upstate NY, near the vermont/canada border. I have prime. The best shipping they usually do is a week. Nigh useless.

We're in rural Vermont, but not particularly remote. Amazon is the same for us, with a minimum 1 week quoted delivery time. And it's not because it actually takes that long to get to us, since Walmart is reliably 2 day. Prime used to be 2 day delivery, like Walmart still is. Amazon has just decided to deprioritize rural northeastern delivery, and just don't ship it out for several days. Even random Ebay sellers using USPS are typically faster. This doesn't make Amazon useless, but it's definitely not my preferred place to buy from anymore.

> They put out a big sign each year saying "We Have Chicks!!!" which means they have baby chickens, ducks and turkeys.

They also sell bees in season, although I think you might have to preorder.

Sure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into.

The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision.

He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup

> I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done.

Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal if the books were out of copyright, but despite the connotation of "rare books" those generally aren't the books we're talking about. Further, in the cases where Google didn't destroy the original of the book they scanned, their scanned copy may be considered infringing under the new standard, so Google doesn't want call undue attention to what they have.