instagraham

I saw a similar perhaps cooler project before - which tbh I don't fully understand but I saved for when/if I buy an electric guitar.

https://github.com/GuitarML/NeuralPi

I guess it's a neural network that you can play any guitar tone to and it'll emulate the settings and processing stack?

noob here - what's the benefit of this? Will using Rust lead to more optimal LLMs or code or both?

it is amusing that a model from a country that has banned porn would ever be developed. Wouldn't there be hurdles for them to access "data" at every stage?

(I know they must have used a VPN for training but it does seem like an added hoop. OFC the UAE's block is also not particularly thorough.)

You'd assume such models would do better in a laissez-faire nsfw environment than in a walled garden of relatively-less sin.

> A few days later, OpenAI gets back to him, and tells him an internal model found a counterexample for Navier–Stokes

Why is OpenAI chatting with him at all at this stage? Is the discussion along the lines of "hey we used the work you are famous for to do a bigger piece of work, just thought you should know" or "heyyy....so we kinda liked what you were typing in your private chat, and thought we'd develop those ideas a bit. and yeah we solved Navier-Stokes in the process. But it's our finding, so do you want like an honorary acknowledgement or do you want to go to court?"

When people worry about OpenAI stealing their chats and reproducing them elsewhere, I usually view the situation as unlikely - since chats are "trained" upon and not necessarily reproduced verbatim, you can assume that unless your chats depict a foundationally new and effective style of communication or ideation, there would be little need or use thereof of training on your chats.

For eg: "Hey ChatGPT my name is X and I am 6 and a half feet tall. Am I anaemic?" This is a query, and while it might suggest to an AI model that tall people may worry about iron deficiencies, it's not really necessary to include in training. The user may be tall or short, but the idea that one may randomly ask about anaemia is not exclusive to this dataset. At best, this chat is an example of linguistics, not anything else, and the models figured out how to write and answer such questions years ago. It is ignored in training.

But when your work involves solid complex and unique mathematical proofs, the data is suddenly worth training upon. If I understand it correctly, the LLM may view your approach as a brand new path to take to solve an otherwise intractable problem. Its reinforcement training emphasises that it should do this in order to improve. And since it leads to results - large internal teams likely flag the model that reached this stage, the model is rewarded and given compute and attention - it is a desireable outcome both for the model and for OpenAI.

OFC, OpenAI becoming an advertising company will suddenly have incentive to treat all data as valuable. But while they are a "we need to make headlines" company, it's more rational that they view these examples of data as more valuable than others.

I don't doubt that they trained on his chats. This seems like the ideal usecase for "mass surveillance but using training" as a sort of filter.

But even so, one wonders how the model differentiates. If the researcher entered proofs into ChatGPT every day that mentioned "strawberries", while no other math paper on the topic did so, does that mean their chats would be audited?

These are just cases of AI models committing <assumed> illegal activity - without any legal convictions yet. If that's the logic, how is Grok not at the top of the list for deepfaking millions?

Edit: I get that this is about agents, but a lot of these instances are about agents going rogue after the human gave them a task. "inadvertently" breaking the law isn't necessarily a lesser category than "did so on command." If we are ranking alignment, Grok is easily one of the least guardrailed.

Funnily enough, I just ran a task on AI Studio with 3.6 yesterday and got 3.7 to do a similar one today; so it serves as an interesting and quick comparisons between the old and the new (usually, if enough time passes between your use of one model and the next, you'll have a sourer view of it than its actual competence suggests).

It hallucinated in both cases despite being given an API key and building a lot of pipes to access data using this. It was a simple "oh shit" fix moment for the model, but weird how eager it was to hallucinate despite the process being designed for it to be data-driven.

We should move past the idea that benchmarks alone tell us whether a model is getting better. I would've had the same experience a year or two ago with 1.5, and the solution would've been similar (keep prompting). I've been investing time into making system prompts and input prompts more meticulous, but the fundamental "it will make shit up" problem still remains, even though it shouldn't when the job involves calling tools.

I know this sounds like I'm expecting superpowers of it (I'm not), but my point is just that these incremental benchmark gains may not reflect user experience.

I get your gist, but I'm not looking at this as a developer but as a journalist. The reason I specified tasks is it broadens the scope to "What I can use" from "What I must pay for".

For example, most people - and especially in my field where many journalists have old laptops - assume you could never run AI models yourself. Finding out Google Colab exists and has a liberal free tier was kinda crazy.

Another: the most privacy-safe way to transcribe interviews would be Whisper on-device, but the second best might be Whisper in a Colab doc. The uploaded files are deleted after each session and you can terminate the runtime and start a new one. AFAIK the data is relatively safer than other approaches (I prefer running transcription locally myself.) It only takes a line of code and a code block to get Whisper running, but few do this and for them, the space after that - Turboscribe, Notebook, etc - relies on compromising your data in some way or the other.

Someone was building a similar one where AI agents run economies. I feel like it's a great way to quickly prototype different economic models and their effects.

Eventually we could have live demos of policy interventions the same day as they're announced

there is perhaps a slippery slope between "the poop cubes made me a believer" and "the creation of poop cubes is irrefutable proof of the existence of God" and I can understand why one would want to abhor such thought processes when writing science.

> Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection

I think this is the most objective take. Perhaps we hype up the "accidentally brilliant" aspects of it more than the "wow this is a kinda random design choice" facets.

>That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.

Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?

I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day

One thing I was sus from the book and which this post didn't clarify for me was whether Carmack truly invented side scrolling for the PC. He claimed to have done so, and even pitched it to Nintendo for a Mario port that never took off.

Also, the idea that it hadn't been done yet by 1990, when consoles were well in the game, suggests the PC market was behind popular gaming in a big way.

>Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

Not my repo, but sharing here in advance of the May 8 end-of-E2EE deadline for Instagram chats

Is this the best option?

I get the sentiment but this is not a real quote

https://factcheck.afp.com/sheikh-mohammed-did-not-say-great-...

It would be quite out of character for him to say this

I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.

I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.

Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?

I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.

"Welcome to the internet. By using this service, you waive your right to privacy, data, any personal IP and the use of your Adblocker. You consent to having all your behaviours, skills and audio/visual likenesses fed to AI models and trained on for eventual recreation. You may direct any or all complaints to Visa or Mastercard, until crypto makes that redundant as well. Have a nice browsing session!"

In some sense, it is a part of one's identity, for one can't easily separate the worldview from the person. But we enter a strange era when your identity is challenged and remoulded by a non-human entity.

People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.

But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.

I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.

Sorry for the tangent.

I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.

Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.

Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.

Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.

The other comments address it well. In the Indian context, I'd say it's all the slum demolition drives that have happened of late, often with questionable reimbursement if any.

Also, I genuinely look forward to setting up a situation monitor when I shift to a bigger place. I've seen the memes about "monitoring the situation with the lads" and always thought it would actually be quite fun.

Thanks for making this project!

It's an elephant in the room and a default instinct to address it

I do want to encourage more BSky use, but a lot of imp OSINT accounts are still on X. Maybe can we have XCancel integration?

Also to better communicate urgency, a scrolling RSS feed news ticker might slap.

I can see myself chaining monitors together and having this in my spare bedroom, in the eventuality that I end up in a house with a spare bedroom

There's a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that resonates whenever I see contrasting debates about this economic indicator or that:

"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

India's IT outsourcing-led GDP growth can benefit many almost-poor and poor people by giving them access to more spending by the "middle-class" (a very debatable minority in India) and the rich. But it will not benefit the poorest - social welfare schemes do that, but anti-homeless measures cancel it out. Access to formalised lending can do that, but anti-immigrant schemes and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of getting an id-card in India will negate that. And banks won't give you a loan if you're poor (so they go to loansharks).

You can have all the Apples and the Facebooks of the world in California, but putting spikes in places where homeless people could sleep makes Gandhi's talisman stand out far better than any macro-economic indicator.

Inflation can be positive or negative but if you're living in a place with less supply than demand, your rent will go up by far more than the price of eggs. This will hurt you completely independently of the price of eggs.

All this to say - if you care about the poorest, you'll find little to cheer about. But should you care about the poorest? Is that a good measure of healthy economic growth? Is economic growth the only priority after 1991?

You can be poor and destitute in a capitalist dystopia and you can be poor and destitute in a communist dystopia. This is why I hate the language of the Cold War so much - we lose an infinite amount of nuance with terms like "Capitalism" "socialism" "communism" and "GDP"

with that analogy, OP's solution is akin to banning the use of knives to harm people, as opposed to banning the knife itself

Make content for your startup? Window-into-the-life, engineering notes, etc - anything that lets the public see what you're up to and that you're serious about the work.

Genuine content always beats the stuff marketing will come up with

I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones.

(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)

The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.

Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.

We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.

From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.

Thanks for the excellent explanation, I didn't know it couldn't distinguish inhibition and excitation.

It seems then that while oxygenation itself may be a good proxy for brain health, the way we measure it is unreliable