foobiekr

The reason is to prevent your site from becoming a watering hole where malicious actors use it to inject malware into the browsers of your users.

TLS isn't for you, it's for your readers.

Cost.

Wait hang on. Is it possible the metallic taste after a flu vaccine is the saline?

Base 60 is genuinely the best option.

However their actual actions resemble companies who know AGI isn’t even on the horizon and moreso they are acting as exactly as if they believe the AI hype bubble is coming to an end and they need to dump the stuff into the public markets asap.

There really isn’t any other way to interpret OpenAI’s actions for the last few months.

Sure it could all be a feint to hide their amazing progress. Or it could be what it looks like.

Given the hype cycles of the last 20 years, I’m going with the second.

Unfortunately, it isn't really practical to have free for all alongside secure by default. Apple is doing the latter, the various non-Google Androids focus on the former.

Would you pay 50x performance decrease?

What problem do you think a DB-as-filesystem solves? The only obvious one that makes any sense at all is cross-file transactions.

Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this.

It isn't close at all.

They will just define away all of those terms to make that not apply.

Specific cases are probably impossible, though there's always hope. After all, to ue the example the nanotech people loved: there are literal assemblers all around you. Whether we can have singular device that can build anything (probably not - energy limits and many many other issues) or factories that can work on atomic scale (maybe) is open, I think. The idea of little robots was kind of visibly silly even at the peak.

The idea of scaling up LLMs and hoping is .. pretty silly.

Perhaps so, but in the expansive definition you're using, even an in-memory binary tree qualifies as a database, which makes your point meaningless.

Microsoft poured at least $100M into this hole with nothing to show for it.

Investment was completely different at the time and interest rates played a huge part of that. VC also wasn't that old in 86.

Goalpost moving.

I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective.

Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI.

That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.

There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).

The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.

I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more.

So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.

Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.

You are confusing that databases implement their own filesystem equivalent functionality in an application-specific way with the idea that FS's can or should be databases.

BeFS wasn't a database. It had indexed queries on EAs and they had the habit of asking application files to add their indexable content to the EAs. Internally it was just a mostly-not-transactional collection of btrees.

There was no query language for updating files, or even inspecting anything about a file that was not published in the EAs (or implicitly do as with adapters), there were no multi-file transactions, no joins, nothing. Just rich metadata support in the FS.

Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about."

The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.

Another possibility is that OpenAL thinks _none_ of the labs will achieve AGI in a meaningful timeframe so they are trying to cash out with whatever you want to call the current models. There will only be one or two of those before investors start looking at the incredible losses.

If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.

Every single time this has been tried it has gone wrong, but sure.

Almost all of the operations done on actual filesystems are not database like, they are close to the underlying hardware for practical reasons. If you want a database view, add one in an upper layer.

I had the unique experience as a youth in attending a school where a substantial portion of the school was funneled there by one of the many 1970s and 1980s troubled teen corporations that spun out of Synanon after it collapsed. This one specialized in drug addicts.

Almost all of my classmates (not me, unfortunately) were from exceptionally wealthy families and excepting one none of them ever mentioned any childhood trauma. Instead they were precocious partiers who got into drugs despite being underage and going to the nightclubs in the seedy part of town - no one at the time was turning away hot young women or gay(for pay or real) young men. And the club scene was a drug scene. It still is.

I don’t think trauma is actually at the root of almost all drug abusers. The only first class abusers (pot and alcohol in serious quantities daily) that I know at the moment grew up in perfectly fine suburban families and are in good, non-narcissistic/controlling/etc relationships with their families. They’re just addicts who can’t stop. One of them is going to die from it, eventually, given his level of alcohol consumption.

"Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?"

Because you need a second generation of researchers.

"letting GPT-4 critique its own answers reduces accuracy"

This is because the output, being the input, steers directly into the tree as soon as the tree is in the context window.

What the hell does 3D hardware have to do with the block copies compositing window managers like MacOS are doing?

Why is this downvoted? It’s clearly a reference to the zizians and MIRI and Bayesian nutjobs is an absolutely correct assessment.

AM for example could plausibly be trained on 4chan and war footage.

Most of the criticism on display here is the outrageous, implausible lies that the tech industry leaders are telling to stupid people who believe it for propaganda purposes to avoid regulation and scrutiny.

None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.

They really aren’t. And I know a lot of them personally.