I'm suprised there isn't more "hope" in this area. Even things like the GPT Pro models; surely that sort of reasoning/synthesis will eventually make its way into local models. And that's something that's already been discovered.
Just the other day I was reading a paper about ANNs whose connections aren't strictly feedforward but, rather, circular connections proliferate. It increases expressiveness at the (huge) cost of eliminating the current gradient descent algorithms. As compute gets cheaper and cheaper, these things will become feasible (greater expressiveness, after all, equates to greater intelligence).
It seems like a lot of the benefits of SOTA models are from data though, not architecture? Won't the moat of the big 3/4 players in getting data only grow as they are integrated deeper into businesses workflows?
That's a good point. I'm not familiar enough with the various moats to comment.
I was just talking at a high level. If transformers are HDD technology, maybe there's SSD right around the corner that's a paradigm shift for the whole industry (but for the average user just looks like better/smarter models). It's a very new field, and it's not unrealistic that major discoveries shake things up in the next decade or less.
With such a high throughput because of sparsity, I'm particulary interested in distilling it into other architectures. I'd like to try a recurrent transformer when I have the time
The Internet Archive would not require the Internet to continue to store digital data, nor to ingest additional digital data. As long as the bills get paid and people watch the machine, the data would remain on disk and accessible.
The Library of Congress has existed for ~225 years, for example.
One requires more electricity than the other, and custodians of somewhat different skills. A sysadmin is a librarian and custodian with technology skills. If you can vault and custodian physical archives at scale, you can do the same for digital data (imho, based on experience with both). You’re simply building resilient systems on durable primitives.
I’m hopeful for a future where you can potentially carry all recorded knowledge on a device and media you can fit in something somewhat human portable [1]. But until then, humans interested will maintain and continually improve archival and information retrieval systems to preserve and make accessible knowledge.
99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,
i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.
It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.
It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.
No need, because whether an online community is more thoughtful or smarter than another is very subjective. Almost by definition, HN is not it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
There are communities I like better, which are smarter and more thoughtful, but I've no desire to argue with you.
Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best".
The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided.
> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
I would call that disparaging.
If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.
"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.
It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.
I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
Well, to be fair the comment that sparked this subtree asserted (maybe in jest? I hope!):
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.
Surely that HN is without question NOT the "unrivaled" website "with the smartest people in the world" should feel neither disparaging nor a surprise to you?
By the way, you got me wrong: I'm not really making a probabilistic argument. I genuinely don't think HN is populated by the smartest people on the internet. Nothing I've read here, in many years of being a regular, has led me to believe people here are anything other than average internet nerds/hackers/entrepreneurs. Maybe slightly above average? There's certainly interesting conversation to be had here, but why would I think HN has the smartest people?
> I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
I've zero interest in going down the route of exchanging subjective opinions with you about what is or isn't smart, nothing good can come out of it. I will point out many "rationalist" communities do believe themselves to be smarter than HN (do I agree with them? Nope. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that most serious online communities will tend to believe themselves better, and HN is no exception).
I'm sorry you feel this is "empty posturing". Maybe I just don't fit with the smartest people on the internet :(
It's really not 'the smartest people.' It's people interested in tech, and often in making-a-lot-of-money-in-tech. It does have a lot of people with significant industry experience, which is cool.
There's a reason why HN of all places has such a terrible record of handling actual sarcasm and telling it apart from genuine belief and that reason is NOT that "HN is really smart" lol
This one is at least healthy-ish for the mind. I’d much rather hacker news than any other news. Social Media is an emotional rage-bait cesspool these days. If it’s not for Hacker News those of us who abstain from the rest would be living in the dark.
I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.
If you're looking to put the brakes on that, I've used LeechBlock to add a 5-second timer to opening a new HN window (along with other block schedules). The timer even fails if it loses focus, so it really helps slow you down.
I've made https://deja.de.hueve.ar/hn so it snapshots the frontpage once per day - that way, I now there won't be new updates during the rest of the day, and the dopamine addiction goes down.
To be fair, making a change (particularly changing a habit) takes time. Having something there to remind and nudge you helps make this easier, especially when you're tired, stressed, 'just looking for a short break', etc, etc.
It's like they say: "Your demons will comfort you when no one else will. That's why it's so hard to get rid of them"
Have you never suffered from habitual reflexes? I blocked twitter for a while in my hosts file and a dozen times over those first few days I instinctively opened a new tab and typed twitter in
We all admire your absolute mastery of your own habitual reflexes and mind. For the rest of us, there is a daily battle of wits, desires, weakness, and habit.
If I could snap my fingers and break toxic habits and patterns, I would have done so decades ago :)
Whoa. A website that cares about its users enough to _easily support limiting access to itself_?
That's so refreshing in terms of being a user-focused feature, and yet it stands in sharp contrast against today's engagement-hyperfocused climate. I never would have thought to look on a website's own settings page to limit my access to that same website.
There is a noprocrast feature in your settings to specify how long you can stay on for a single session and the frequency at which you can view HN. Super helpful!
To add to this, the low-level constraints also make this assumption noisy, no matter how smart the compiler is. On the CPython case, if you do `dis.dis('DAY = 24 * 60 * 60)` you will see that constant folding nicely converts it to `LOAD_CONST 86400`. However, if you try `dis.dis('ATOMS_IN_THE_WORLD = 10*50')` you will get LOAD_CONST 10, LOAD_CONST 50, BINARY_OP **.
But to what extent should we care for such a small website? The AI witch hunt won't get us too far, and this new way of producing is only getting started. The loss of control to a non-deterministic black box is worrysome, but at some point non-vibe coded (hard coded? brain coded?) software might become less error-prone that vibe-coded
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