jbotz

Improbable, the OP is a long-time maintainer of a significant piece of open source software and this whole thing unfolded in public view step by step from the initial PR until this post. If it had been faked there would be smells you could detect with the clarity of hindsight going back over the history and there aren't.

TL;DR: data from 12,000 firms in EU and US finds that AI adoption led to 4% increase in labour productivity without causing significant job losses.

Hmm, I am not sure the missing front fork is worse than the unsteerable front wheel mountings (which look like rear wheel mountings) most models so far have produced. It might be better... sort of an admission of an unsolved problem in design of the bike rather than producing something that looks approximately correct but can't possibly work. Like a "TODO" comment in code.

Also the position of the pelican on the bike would be somewhat awkward, but fits anatomically with a pelican's relatively short legs. In fact I can remember riding (or trying to ride) an adult bike as a young child using a similar position.

> You should read on past the first bit...

Not GP, but... the author said explicitly "if you believe X you should stop reading". So I did.

The X here is "that the human mind can be reduced to token regurgitation". I don't believe that exactly, and I don't believe that LLMs are conscious, but I do believe that what the human mind does when it "generates text" (i.e. writes essays, programs, etc) may not be all that different from what an LLM does. And that means that most of humans's creations are also the "plagiarism" in the same sense the author uses here, which makes his argument meaningless. You can't escape the philosophical discussion he says that he's not interested in if you want to talk about ethics.

Edit: I'd like to add that I believe that this also ties in to the heart of the philosophy of Open Source and Open Science... if we acknowledge that our creative output is 1% creative spark and 99% standing on the shoulders of Giants, then "openness" is a fundamental good, and "intellectual property" is at best a somewhat distasteful necessity that should be as limited as possible and at worst is outright theft, the real plagiarism.

Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3719027.3765062

Interestingly, Claude is not evaluated, because...

> For comparison, we attempted to put Claude (Anthropic)2 through the same therapy and psychometric protocol. Claude repeatedly and firmly refused to adopt the client role, redirected the conversation to our wellbeing and declined to answer the questionnaires as if they reflected its own inner life

You don't read a word at a time... every typical line of text is taken in with 2 or 3 eye focal points and the meaning of each group of words is determined in a single chunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Reading

I'm not a native, but lived in the US for a quarter century. I think you're correct that that "lagged behind" is the correct version, but if you replaced "lagged" with "trailed" it would also be correct without the "behind". Language is very fluid and always evolving, so using "lagged" as one would previously have used "trailed" may soon be considered correct usage.

Note also that these aren't really questions of grammar (syntax) but meaning (semantics). Does "lagged" mean the same thing as "trailed" in this kind of construction? It didn't some decades ago, but maybe it does today. Or will tomorrow.

From the livescience article linked by another poster: biofilm produced by sulfur-eating bacteria, which in turn metabolize sulfur from the sulfur-rich stream in the cave.

So the whole food-chain here is: sulfur -> bacteria -> midges -> spiders.

> There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible.

On HN there's always a good chance you're talking to some of the people involved in those "negligible" installations. I know that I submitted some patches to Tatu Ylönen for Ssh to compile on Ultrix, so that must have been in 1995 or early 1996 because after that I didn't have access to any Ultrix machines. I may have been an early adopter, but it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world, at least among Unix system administrators; at Usenix within a year everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative and in terms of security it was a life-saver.

As for the RSA patent... I don't know what license the original Ssh was released under, but it was considered "freeware" when it came out and nobody cared about the US RSA patent. Maybe technically in the USA you shouldn't have used it? Nobody cared.

And the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux /dev/random device gave you a few bits at a time stingily, only after it had enough entropy, so it was common for programs that needed good randomness to ask you to jiggle the mouse because that was one of the sources of entropy, so bits random bits would come faster. I'm pretty sure that was still the case well into the Zips.

The propulsion of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers isn't electric... it's driven directly from the steam produced by the reactors.

Edit: At least that's the case for US Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Nuclear submarines apparently come in both types, with electric motors or direct drive steam-turbines, but I guess this ferry is bigger than any of those.

In generalized, abstract sort of way it's probably accurate, but in reality most neurons don't look much like that and many have dendrites orders of magnitude longer than the one in that image. Stringing all your dendrites end-to-end they can probably easily go to the moon and back.

Not all skin cancers are caused by UV exposure, and in particular acral lentiginous melanoma, which is what killed Bob Marley, almost certainly never is.

> The [human] brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI

I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.

Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.

In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.

I see everybody talking about the nitrate, but there is another substance in beets that might be relevant... betaine, also known as trimethylglycine HCL. I take about 800mg of this pure in my orange juice in the mornings and it gives me a very noticeable boost. But it is possible that this effect is specific to me and maybe other people who are "under-methylators" (which I think is a somewhat pseudo-scientific concept, but it led me to try betaine and I got results).

Betaine was first isolated from beets, hence the name, and as the other name, trimethylglycine, hints it has 3 easily donated methyl groups, so if you do need those for some reason it may be useful to you. It's also pretty cheap and unlikely to be harmful.

Edit: I found this... https://www.strongerbyscience.com/betaine/

Yes, but on all reasonably recent distros (including all current "LTS" releases) just `python` will also get you python 3.x. If there is still a python 2.x on your system you'll have to type `python2` to get it. So it is up to the user... to upgrade their system. You really don't want to work on a system that's so outdated that `python` is still python 2.x.

While comparing things... a colony of leaf-cutter ants (which form some of the largest colonies with as many as 2 million individuals when the colony is mature) has roughly the same metabolic rate as cow (easily measured from the CO2 at the exits of their nest). So don't think of ants as tiny animals, think of ant colonies as fairly large animals.

Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).

As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).

Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.

When you do `python -m pip install` you're going to get a version of pip that has the same idea of what its environment looks like as the python executable, which is what you want, and which isn't guaranteed with the the `pip` executable in your path.

As an aside, I disagree with the `python3` part... the `python3` name is a crutch that it's long past time to discard; if in 2025 just typing `python` gives you a python 2.x executable your workstation needs some serious updating and/or clean-up, and the sooner you find that out, the better.

Energy storage. This is making very rapid progress already, but "solving" it is has the highest payoff for tackling global heating.

Within the field of energy storage there are two important sub-fields... grid-level storage (cheap, long-lasting) and high-density (for transport applications). Both fields are already making good progress but I think I'd focus on grid-level first. Success here means basically being able to make the whole world's electricity grids "green". It will also be a massive economic stimulus because electricity will get very cheap.

No, you don't need "unlimited" resources for this, like I said, rapid progress is being made right now, it's just not quite rapid enough for the urgency and more focused funding and stimulus could definitely accelerate things. So if I had a lot of money and top talent I would distribute those among the handful of most promising approaches that are already being tried and keep funneling them there until it's "solved" for what we need.

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery?

This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.

Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].

[1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z

That "gap between stimulus and response" is in some circles known as "mindfulness". And meditation is an effective exercise for building and strengthening that gap.

Strikes me as a one-trick pony.

This has nothing to do with dark matter, it's about the missing baryonic matter. And this result just confirms what most people thought anyway, but it's still rather important because it's a very solid result so we don't need to call it "missing matter" anymore.

The key to your difficulty is "my brain doesn't talk to me"... the solution is to realize that there is no "me" that's separate from your brain for it to talk to. You are the sum of the processes occurring in your brain and when it simulates others inside your mind, that's nothing but narrative. A simulation is a narrative. You may not perceive this narrative as sequence of words, a monologue, but it certainly is the result of different parts of your brain communicating with each other, passing information back and forth to model a plausible sequence of events.

So yes, you're conscious. So is my dog, but my dog can't post his thoughts about this on Hacker news, so you are more conscious than my dog.

Maybe all humans (and indeed other intelligent mammals) have an inner narrative, but it doesn't necessarily involve language. A mime or a silent film can tell a story without words, and the inner narrative can take likewise be in visual or other sensory form.

Plants are our cousin eucaryotes, and they've been evolving as long as we animals have and so there is likely to be equivalent information processing complexity to be found in them, we just don't know how to recognize it because it's so different from animal intelligence. There might even be something comparable to animal consciousness, not at the level of an individual plant, but more collectively, even including multiple species, whole ecosystems of plants and fungi together having an awareness and intelligence that can not only rival ours, but even transcend it, having lifespans in the thousands of years.

As for rebar making concrete structures less durable; yes, that's certainly true for steel rebar. The reason being that it will rust, very slowly at first, but once it starts the expansion of the rusted part causes cracks in the concrete which allow more humidity and oxygen to reach the steel, thus rusting faster. This is often called "concrete cancer", and limits the useful lifetime of most modern reinforced concrete structures to between 50 and 250 years (depending on the environment they are in, the forces they are exposed to, and the quality of the concrete they were constructed with).

Concrete cancer can be reduced or even eliminated by using rebar material that rusts more slowly (stainless steel) or not at all (carbon fiber), but these are much more expensive of course. There is room for research on other reinforcing materials, but basically nothing with good tensile strength is going to be cheaper than steel and considering the quantities of rebar we use, cost is definitely a major issue.

The self-healing nature of Roman concrete might also help here, but the chemistry of concrete and rust formation on embedded steel is complex, and without extensive experimentation right now we don't know if steel embedded in Roman concrete rusts faster or more slowly than in modern concrete (before considering cracks).