Hacker News Reader

atwrkon Poland's clean energy usage overtakes coal for first time

Edit: I snarkily replied to an imagined comment, not the one that was actually written...

atwrkon Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean

Whose rationale? More efficiency leading to less resource use never happened, it always leads to more resource use (jevons paradox).

AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.

atwrkon AbsenceBench: Language models can't tell what's missing

> I don't think we're born with any concepts at all, it's all quite chaotic initially with consistent sensory inputs that we use to train/stabilise our neural network.

That is exactly the thing that doesn't seem to be true, or at least it is considered outdated in neuroscience. We very much have some concepts that are inert, and all other concept we learned in relation to the things that are already there in our brains - at birth mostly sensorymotor stuff. We decidedly don't learn new concepts from scratch, only in relation to already acquired concepts.

So our brains work quite a bit different than LLMs, despite the neuron metaphor used there.

And regarding your food example, the difference I was trying to point out: For LLMs, the word and the concept, are the same thing. For humans they are different things that are also learned differently. The memorization part (mostly) only affects the word, not the concept behind it. What you described was only the learning of the word "tall" - the child in your example already knew that the other person was taller than them, it just didn't know how to talk about that.

atwrkon AbsenceBench: Language models can't tell what's missing

> That's how humans also learn ie. adding numbers. First there is naive memoization, followed by more examples until you get it.

Just nitpicking here, but this isn't how humans learn numbers. They start at birth with competency up to about 3 or 5 and expand from that. So they can already work with quantities of varying size (i.e. they know which is more, the 4 apples on the left or the five on the right, and they also know what happens if I take one apple from the left and put it to the others on the right), and then they learn the numbers. So yes, they learn the numbers through memorization, but only the signs/symbols, not the numeric competency itself.

atwrkon Guess I'm a Rationalist Now

Not interested in discussing that topic here, but that is precisely the kind of category error that would fit right in with the rationalist crowd: GP was talking about human rights, i.e. actual humans, you are talking about nations or peoples, which is an entirely orthogonal concept.

atwrkon Tesla seeks to guard crash data from public disclosure

May I ask why you are a shareholder? IMO Tesla is headed straight into insolvency with sales collapsing all over the world and factories at <60% capacity, all while the global EV market is surging.

atwrkon Tariffs in American History

And I think the most important part: Tariffs are only a part of a larger system of a comprehensive agricultural policy in Norway, covering region-specific subsidies, research, agro-tourism and sustainbility. The country doesn't just make food more expensive at the border.

atwrkon Tariffs in American History

It's all over the place, depending on the industry. I mean Hollywood's rise was also due to IP theft, things only became the way they are now in the 1950s.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2012-05-10/research/bumpy-histor...

atwrkon What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

Tax systems create wealthy people in two ways:

a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf

b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by investing more in universities than schools, or infrastructure in wealthy neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods (both true for the US).

atwrkon What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

They are decidedly a result of the taxation system of a country. The country decided they wanted to have this class of people to exist. (The degree of) Wealth inequality is always a product of society.

atwrkon Texas Senate passes bill requiring solar plants to provide power at night

Because it is outrageously expensive compared to renewables, you can't turn it off at night, it takes literally decades to build, and nobody wants it near where they live.

atwrkon Mistral ships Le Chat – enterprise AI assistant that can run on prem

Why would that be? I can see why Americans wouldn't want to do that, but Europeans? In the current political climate, where the US openly claims their desire to annex European territory and so on? I'd rather see them prefer a locally hostable open source solution like DeepSeek.

atwrkon Wyze pays $255k of tariffs on $167k of floodlights

Actually it's an import tax - the importer pays it, not the foreign worker.

atwrkon Wyze pays $255k of tariffs on $167k of floodlights

Thanks to the chicken tax we already know how this will develop: The US floodlight company will sell those US-made lights these lights for ~400k (so at the margin of market price plus tariffs), and no one outside the US will want to buy them. This is literally what already happened with the US car industry.

atwrkon Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

There's a bunch of sources if you search for "grid-forming", "islanding events", "auto-synchronization" and similar terms in combination with PV inverters.

atwrkon Spain is about to face the challenge of a "black start"

Not my area of expertise, but I think this is wrong? Modern PV inverters used in rooftop solar could easily start frequency synchronization autonomously, but are regulated to not do that autonomously in (at least) parts of the EU.

More importantly, according to the REE, PV played a mayor role in the current and successful black start.

atwrkon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

Here, US manufacturing output is up 50% since 2010: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

That it's relative share in GDP is down during that time means that other sectors were growing even faster (think Google, Netflix and so on, so services instead of things). That the service sector gains in relative importance is actually a sign of an advanced economy, every modern economy looks like that, not just the US.

atwrkon Tesla deliveries down 43% in Europe while EVs are up 31%

Isn't the potential revenue of spacex way lower? That market is quite a bit smaller than cars, and will be for the foreseeable future.

atwrkon Dutch Parliament: Time to ditch US tech for homegrown options

> How do I fire an employee? That's right, I don't.

It's easy to fire employees in Germany (especially in small shops), e.g. when they steal, are always late, are badmouthing colleagues, are talking about company internals, are insolent to customers, deliver bad work, and on and on.

You simply have to follow a defined process (basically at least one written warning for the same thing before firing).

What you can't do is having a Musk style temper tantrum and fire someone at will because you feel like that.

Source: I had to fire multiple people in Germany.

atwrkon EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

This is a false dichotomy: Noone is forbidding Apple doing intergration of their products. The DMA simply forbids barring competitors from the same access.

Just compare how Apple cripples third party smartwatches on ios.

atwrkon EU sends Apple first DMA interoperability instructions for apps and devices

I doubt it. So far, they have dropped every anti-competitive tactic that the EU has objected to.

After all, in which other market are they expected to grow? China already shifts to domestic brands, and other regions lack the purchasing power.

atwrkon Cognitive Behaviors That Enable Self-Improving Reasoners

With humans, it has been shown that reasoning processes for different aspects of human behavior are completely distinct from verbalization, they work fully autonomous, and the (inner) verbalization comes afterwards.

For LLMs, the tokens (i.e. words) are what the weights are based on, as there isn't other input into them.

atwrkon MacBook Air M4

I bet you had an Intel CPU. Intel is almost always the worse option since the first Ryzens were released in 2017 or so.

(Intel has to have some sketchy deals with manufacturers, otherwise why design a product like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon line only to put these Intel energy hogs in there?)

atwrkon Buy European Made. Support European Values

Voter suppression: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

atwrkon Cognitive Behaviors That Enable Self-Improving Reasoners

As someone with an educational background I actually often ask myself the opposite: Why don't AI techniques almost never seem to use the knowledge we have about human learning to train better AI?

atwrkon Cognitive Behaviors That Enable Self-Improving Reasoners

It's also very probable that the verbalization the majority does internally is just that - a verbalization of the actual underlying thought process. That is what much of current cognitive linguistics points to as far as I have understood.

(Also a reason why I'm very sceptical that the current LLM approach will eventually lead to AGI, BTW)

atwrkon Apple M3 Ultra

If I'm not mistaken, each token produced roughly equals the whole model in memory transfers (the exception being MoE models). That's why memory bandwidth is so important in the first place, or not?

atwrkon Apple M3 Ultra

But 80Gbit/s is way slower than even regular dual channel RAM, or am I missing something here? That would mean the LLM would be excruciatingly slow. You could get an old EPYC for a fraction of that price and have more performance.

atwrkon The Demoralization is just Beginning

Contrary to serious economists Austrians try very hard to avoid specific forecasts, but we all can nonetheless look at their writings and compare what actually happened during every crisis in the last 50 years - and nothing Austrians are postulating proved correct. Or just look at the very last, covid caused one: If you'd been doing prognoses with textbook keynesianism regarding inflation, demand, stimulus effects and so on, you'd been pretty spot on. Just read the old blog posts from krugman from 2020 onwards as an example. The Austrians, by comparison, predicted 5 of the last 0 hyperinflation scenarios correctly.

atwrkon The Demoralization is just Beginning

To add to this point: We can look to China to see that the financialization of the economy, like it happened in the US, is not a natural law but can instead be restricted. China has explicitly said that they see the development of financial markets in the US as a problem for the US economy they decidedly aim to avoid.

Stories like what happened to Jack Ma have to be interpreted in that context, I think. In my reading that wasn't about politics at all, but about an unregulated peer to peer lending product (i.e. a tech based loan shark system for exploiting people in need) he was about to release.