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anon1253on Prism

Slightly off-topic but related: currently I'm in a research environment (biomedicine) where a lot of AI is used. Sometimes well, often poorly. So as an exercise I drafted some rules and commitments about AI and research ("Research After AI: Principles for Accelerated Exploration" [1]), I took the Agile manifesto as a starting point. Anyways, this might be interesting as a perspective on the problem space as I see it.

[1] https://gist.github.com/joelkuiper/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e42...

anon1253on Subsec fluctuations in extracellular dopamine encode prediction errors in humans

It always fascinated me how a lot of "state" in our neural networks is probably encoded in the extracellular fluids rather than in the neurons themselves. Biological neural networks really do not like it if you swap out their fluids (you can do this experimentally in vitro). For me it has always been one of those "nature really doesn't care about complexity" things ... it will just use whatever tools are available with little to no regard for our understanding of "boundaries". I'm not saying this complexity is strictly needed for intelligence (however that is defined) ... but I do always find it a little bit dishonest when scientists (and especially those working with pharmaceuticals) "zoom in" to the cells and then usually promptly forget that those cells are part of the much wider stage of tissues and eventually even everything outside the confines of our skin. Anyway, just my two cents.

anon1253on Multifaceted: The linguistic echo chambers of LLMs

It's a fascinating topic. I've often been surprised by its use of "tapestry" (as in "the tapestry of existence") and I never really figured out why it seems to gravitate towards such a relatively uncommon phrase. As usual I am reading too much into it (seemingly the logit for "tapestry" was higher than the others), but why? And what do these preferences tell us about the LLMs more generally? Anyway, fascinating!

anon1253on Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

RDF and semantic web used to be my goto's for this, as I believe many of the core ideas are still valid and often overlooked and sometimes even poorly re-implemented. Which says something.

However, lately I've come to like llama.cpp and friends, yes it's not ChatGTP miracle whatever but how often do you /actually/ need that? Despite its tremendous popularity, it still seems like something more people should know about. For me, I've had great fun with running LLMs locally and experiencing their different "flavors" from a more "phenomenological" (what is it like to use them) perspective rather than a technological one.

anon1253on Mistral 7B

Code is up https://github.com/vortext/esther but it's still heavily work in progress :-)

anon1253on Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://github.com/vortext/esther

Esther is my personal project to develop a diary app that talks back. Basically. Along the way I learned how to htmx, llama.cpp via JNA and practical experience with LLMs. I suffer from type-1 bipolar disorder with psychoses and normal life just ain't gonna happen. So unemployed, single, #nolife ... I decided to build a chat bot for myself. It's not finished the RAG stuff still needs implementing, but oh well. It's written in Clojure on GraalVM (because I wanted to try polyglot) other than that it's nothing /too/ fancy ... but it feels great having an LLM + UI you can just build the way you like it

anon1253on Mistral 7B

Cool! And on top of that TheBloke has the quantized models of course:

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-v0.1-GGUF

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-OpenOrca-GGUF

https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1-GGU...

I typically run my models with the 5_K_M or 6_K quantization, but it really depends on the use case and requirements

anon1253on Mistral 7B

Probably soon! I'll post it here. Still finalizing some Retrieval Augmented Generation things. It's written in Clojure with a very thin HTMX front-end. However there are some interesting things like using gbnf grammar constraints creatively for chain-of-thought reasoning. It's a one-person job though but I've always wanted a diary that feels like someone to talk to, and the tech is finally here!

anon1253on Mistral 7B

I typically write them myself in the form of a "you are-such-and-so, your role is this-and-that. As such-and-so you have the following traits..." and so on. Sometimes I let some other AI rewrite it. There's very little method or science to it for me: if it feel right, it's right. Typically I find the first few chat-lines of the prompt (i.e. the chat history in the context) to be much more decisive to the conversation flow than the actual prompt itself. But it's all just "prompt" of course. My biggest realization in making the things go was "it's just a wall of text, the chat bits are just a thin facade". Write the prompt the way you want the text to continue, basically. It's a fancy Eliza. The folks over at https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ sometimes share their (sometimes NSFW) prompts as well though. Right now I'm working on a minimalist interactive journaling app (a diary that talks back), and it's been a lot of fun to do and learn

anon1253on Mistral 7B

I'll give those a shot as well, thanks! It's a tricky balance sometimes between "I should actually finish building the thing I am trying to build" and "ooooh shiny new model to try for a bit...", however.

anon1253on Bad Emacs defaults

Being one of those people that still recommends Emacs and have sunk countless hours in my personal dotfiles: I kinda enjoy doing it, that's why I am doing it. It feels great having a configuration so tailored to me personally that it almost feels like clothing or other lifestyle choices. I mean sure, clothes, makeup, cars and whatever are all also huge wastes of time and resources in our short and mostly dreadful lives, but at least Emacs still brings me joy :-)

anon1253on Mistral 7B

It works really really well for chatbots and roleplay applications (at least for me). The fine-tune on the instruct version is rather meh however, and I recommend https://huggingface.co/Open-Orca/Mistral-7B-OpenOrca/ if you plan on using it out-of-the-box. Take note of the prompt template, you'll get really undesired results otherwise (basically just garbage). I've been running it on my pet projects with llama.cpp and the inference is blazing fast even with my mediocre 2080 Super

anon1253on Memory loss: Expert advice for improving memory and concentration

I'm guessing auto correct for "by heart"

anon1253on Vald: A Highly Scalable Distributed Vector Search Engine

There was a similar situation in a project I worked on, at the time FAISS/Annoy/SPTAG were considered but we were really looking for something more managed, think ElasticSearch rather than Lucene. As luck would have it we stumbled upon https://www.milvus.io/ and it certainly checks a lot of boxes. But I'm rather excited to see some competition in this space, it's a broadly applicable trick so I'll definitely take a look at Vald next time it comes up as well!

anon1253on Police warn students to avoid Sci-Hub

A bit of a technical tangent, but I wonder if a peer to peer version of this website would increase its chances of survival. I can easily imagine something like a reference manager that puts copies of the PDFs you've read or written on IPFS. It would still require some central node that coordinates the sharing, but if some open source ActivityPub service would fill that role it could work I think. Provided there is of course enough personal incentive to share and keep sharing these works.

anon1253on Tripolar Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe

Interesting! I can echo these findings from from personal experience. For the past 5-6 years I had been doing remote work for a US west-coast based company from the Netherlands. My annual salary as a senior "data scientist" was at least double, if not triple, that of my fellow Dutch peers. Typically salaries around here seem to stall at the €45-60k/yr mark with very few positions open at higher tiers (and usually not advertised through any typical recruitment portals, where salaries are typically even lower, even when commanding decades of experience in obscure technologies). When I left that remote position the options really did seem limited, and I ended up taking a substantial pay cut. Short of trying to bootstrap your own company (VC-like funding here is also not very typical, with angel investors being almost non-existent) moving seemed the only option, which I had no real intention of doing. Even moving slightly east to Germany seemed to be the better option. I think our current predicament has really opened the market though. Remote work is no longer considered weird and there definitely are very talented and skilled engineers up for grabs here in the Netherlands if they are coached ever so slightly. I wonder if there is an opportunity here for an employment-agency-ish company facilitating the overseas hiring process and legalese. Exciting times!

anon1253on Best practices can slow your application down

My hope is that the same realization will eventually come to web developers as well. A well written desktop application is much faster, and typically more stable, than a web app that's hosted ... well who can tell where. This isn't to say that web applications don't offer tremendous value, but it is definitely a trade-off worth considering sometimes.

anon1253on Transparent OLEDs

You could put an eInk display behind it, and have sort of a dual mode of interaction. If both can be constructed flexibly/foldable (with or without a hinge) I can see some very interesting designs. The ability of eInk to switch to black, or just display semi-permanent information with amazing readability and low power usage, while still having portions of the screen be high refresh rate and full color would be amazing.

anon1253on Covid-19 Open Research Dataset

It might be fun to checkout https://covid19.doctorevidence.com/ they have loaded the CORD dataset with a dashboard like interface and a query language. E.g. https://search.doctorevidence.com/search?query=ss(6f1da786-6... (user/pass covid19/covid19) for a direct link, and it provides integration with the other medically relevant feeds.

anon1253on Covid-19 Open Research Dataset

Checkout https://covid19.doctorevidence.com/ they have loaded the CORD dataset with a dashboard like interface and a query language. E.g. https://search.doctorevidence.com/search?query=ss(6f1da786-6... (user/pass covid19/covid19)

anon1253on 1195725856 and other mysterious numbers

That might be worth spending the half a day if you can get some bug bounty money for those bugs!

anon1253on Intel Has PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs Ready, but Nothing to Plug Them Into

As an experiment I put two of them mirrored as L2Arc in front of an 6 drive SATA600 SSD (Samsung 860 Pro) ZFS array (zfs equivalent of raid 0+1) for PostgreSql / graph databases. It seems to help a bit for random access hits, but not as much as I hoped. Fancy devices though

anon1253on Having Kids

ight, so this will probably come across as self-centered an pathetic. But it’s what I feel right now. I’m a 28 year old male, have a significant other, good income, and an education in Artificial Intelligence and Epidemiology (PhD drop out to start my own business). So nothing to be ashamed of, I don’t think. I run a small team, with nice, friendly, competent, and hand-picked colleagues. I have family that cares about me. But every day, all day, I spend looking at a computer screen. Day in, day out, I’m glued to my screen. Some days it’s exciting, some days it’s mind numbing and boring. Some days I go for a walk, alone. And no days, for the past year or so, I’ve felt like I connected with someone. I tweet about 10 tweets a day, I get favorites, a retweet occasionally. I work from home. I’ve alienated all my friends. I’m barely in contact with the people from high-school or university. I don’t know why, I just forget or neglect to message back. You can do that twice, then they forget about you too. I rarely forget though, they still linger in my mind daily.

So what’s the problem? Is there a problem? I worry a lot. I think we’re headed for a disaster. As a species, as a culture, our days are numbered. I read the reports, I’ve done enough math to see the implications; climate change will kill us. There might be some things to stop it, but they’re too few, too late. I worry, a lot. In my day to day business I don’t deal with this. I do machine learning for evidence based medicine, natural language processing basically. But what occupies my mind is the disaster we’re headed. It’s all connected. That sounds like something a mad man would say, in a delusional rage rant of incoherent sentences. Maybe it is. But, the thought fills me with a cognitive dissonance, a numbing and parallelizing feeling of nothingness. Are we even worth saving as a species? Why are we here? Why am I here. I did some philosophy reading. I like Sartre, Camus, Karl Jaspers. The absurdity of your own choices, your own life. Am I doing the right thing? Wouldn’t it be better to spend my, arguably well educated, skills on the more pressing matters in life?

I made the choice not to have children. It’s stupid to have children. We’re overpopulated, and our resources are stretched thin. Unless we make space colonization or transhumanism a priority there’s just a finite amount of “stuff”. We’re reaching the finiteness of that stuff. Maybe not today, but growth is exponential, the cup will be half full before it’s full. Things change slowly, then quickly. Some people think it’s arrogant not to have children. But what makes your genes so special? I sequenced mine, all of it, it’s nothing special. I might get a tattoo with my special genes (the ones with a low minor allele frequency). Perhaps some people get children because they’re lonely. I’m lonely. What’s left in life? What will be my contribution? If it’s not another random soul on a planet headed for disaster, then what is? I’m thinking about planting trees. A lot of them. I spend months thinking about preventing climate change, and “trees” is all I could think of in the end. Besides, I cherish and romanticize the post-melodramatic idea of walking in my own forest.

What is the cause, what is the symptom? Where does my own hubris end, and do the problems of the world start? I am not so sure anymore. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this. My ideas go unvalidated, they run amok in the days glued to my screen. The moments I’m in “the zone”, and can focus on nothing but the code in front of me, are meditative. There’s a spirituality in connecting with computers, alone. It’s often neglected in the hipster computer science culture, with their faux new-atheist movements. Experiences can be mystical, there is a desire to transcend. I used to identify as an atheist, read the cruft by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins. I don’t think they hold water anymore. Mostly because they turn out to be assholes. I like the term Humanism. I like rationality, science done proper without the dogma. Our human condition is more than that though. I guess Jaspers would call it the “encompassing”. Or some such, never got that figured out. Neither did he, probably.

Why am I here. I’m 28. With my health habits, I’ll probably die of myocardial infarction at the age of 50. A BMI of 26 and bad genes does that to you. Male European genes are bad, mind you. Males are the weaker gender, don’t be fooled; just look at the flimsy Y-chromosome. What will be my legacy? Does it even matter? I’ve been thinking of moving to Iceland. It makes sense to me: good sources of energy and water, small population. With the increasing climate change it might even be good for farming. Climate change has upsides. Migration coupled with fascism is the big downside, that and death of course. I had an idea for a short story: I’ve migrated to Iceland. Under a bright aurora I decide to go outside. The world has gone to shit. I didn’t see the aurora coming. The NOAA satellites were deemed strategic assets for what was left of precision agriculture, and hence shut down for public access. I look up and see the bright green filaments move across the sky. I decide to take a look uphill, take my camera. I’ve made it, I’m happy. I still got it, I got my self-sustaining home, my books. I watch our insignificance as I ponder the implications of basic nuclear physics. I trip. And as I fall down the hill, breaking every bone, I gasp in my last life’s breath “well isn’t this ironic”.

It’s all been done before hasn’t it? It doesn’t matter, what matters is that you do something with your life. I’m a mess. Not on the outside, I give talks in my domain, I’m respected in the very narrow subfield I’m in, do the laundry, keep my teeth clean. I even take care of my body, although not as much as I like. But it’s my mind. It’s my goddamn mind. We’re headed for disaster: I can see it when I close my eyes.

Once you’re caught in one of the migration streams, trying to catch the next plane or boat, you’ll think of the endless queues in Disneyland. That is what will happen. And here I am, alone, sitting behind a screen.

anon1253on Molten Bismuth Shader

If this was some meditative game of sorts (optionally multiplayer) on my phone I would play it for ages (not sure about the mechanics yet, but I already spend 5 minutes just fiddling with it in my browser). Truly mesmerizing, cool stuff!

anon1253on Inventing an Operation to Solve x^x = y (2000)

I asked the same question a while ago, https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/613946/xx-y-given-y...

Interesting analysis of the problem :-) it has been bugging me since high school!

Might be worth linking to the Lambert W function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert_W_function

This was the best comment I'd reckon:

> As you probably saw, the solution of x^x = y is x = Log(y) / W[Log(y)]. Now you take us in a highly philosophical debate. What is the limit of elementary functions ? Thanks for this question. Cheers. – Claude Leibovici

anon1253on It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a neuroscientist [video]

Kant? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself

anon1253on I Miss the Old Internet

Similarly named discussion from a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552

anon1253on Storing 50M events per second in Elasticsearch

we use zombodb https://www.zombodb.com/ to keep ES and Postgresql in sync, it has its flaws but when it works it works perfectly. That at least helps with 1 and 3, which are indeed a major annoyances.

anon1253on Lesser Known Coding Fonts

Not entirely sure I understand, but maybe Pragmata Pro? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragmataPro

anon1253on 24-Hour Solar Energy: Molten Salt Makes It Possible

True, but planting trees as a method for carbon sequestering is not a novel idea, and currently seems one of the better short-term options. Long term it's not that great for the reason you mentioned, and there is quite a lot of debate about it going on right now.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z

for two more or less competing views.