stormfather

Yeah but if you need features like Cloud Functions or SMS auth you have to give your credit card... with no spending limit... and the standard practice is to expose your firebase creds on the client... and their stated stance is its better to let you get attacked and then maybe waive the charges than to interrupt service to your site for a few hours... lol. Your recourse is to go viral on social media and get them to forgive the debt.

As a small dev firebase is horrifying.

I think its a nice idea. People here criticize everything. They would probably criticize the idea of hiring a producer too. Any interest yet?

Flash 2.0 has been excellent for its price point for me. And their multimodal work is leading the field. Their top-end foundation models are a bit lacking but they are catching up fast there too.

This is going to transform our society more than anything else. A giant foundation model can be cast for very, very cheap inference. Imagine the improvement from room sized computers to your iPhone, applied to this branch of technology.

That is by definition systemic racial discrimination. This isn't hard to understand.

Are you using something like Pipecat or the VAPI API? How are you handling your voice->voice pipeline and your audio infra?

My point is that you're presenting Herzl as if all he wanted was to legally purchase land for a Jewish state. But you left out that he advocated systemic racial discrimination to coerce another group to leave. I'm trying to ask if this would color your previously neutral and benign characterization of him.

Of course they do lol. Boys when given a doll will hit stuff with it. Girls will have a tea party. However, the people who don't have enough social sense to stop talking skew male. Women are generally much better conversational partners.

He also said that Jews should only hire other Jews.

If I was a politician that advocated Britain is for the British, and that whites should only hire other whites so that minorities have to leave due to economic pressure, how would you view me?

Or is this wrong?

Clearly they understand they need to integrate Gemini into search but it wasn't cheap or accurate enough yet. Do you really think THE search and AI giant is going to ignore AI search?

I think the winning strategy is making a small model that's good enough to embed in search, etc, at no cost. Google has the best small models. But whoever wins this will be whoever makes a more efficient computing substrate for LLM inference, like running a transformer with lenses or something like that. Winning strategy there is acquisition.

But Google is the household name. All they have to do is bring Gemini inside Google before people stop using traditional search.

Oh fuck me. Can you use this to make an analog transformer out of tiny lenses that's pre-trained? Like, take a digital PyTorch transformer model and spec out the lenses to recreate the computations? And build that? If so, you will cover yourself in glory. Intelligence too cheap to meter.

In the Amazon a lot of the "uncontacted tribes" have been contacted by illegal loggers, miners and in the past rubber harvesters, and have every reason to think we're all a bunch of demons. The ones who still hide out are often the victims of past massacres, and not even the prospect of shoes and plastic cups is enough to overcome their reaction to how they were treated in the past.

I have a rule that modifies a base password depending on the name of the site the password is for. That way I only have to remember the base password and the rule.

Please don't turn HackerNews into this kind of a site. There are enough of those on the internet, and only one HackerNews.

There are a few topics, like racial differences, which are pretty verboten. Here's an interesting example: https://davidsun.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-arcticism-the...

From the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51053205

A letter filed by Assistant US Attorneys Jason Swergold and Maurene Comey said "the footage contained on the preserved video was for the correct date and time, but captured a different tier than the one where Cell-1 was located", New York City media report.

"The requested video no longer exists on the backup system and has not since at least August 2019 as a result of technical errors."

And from NPR:

After first reporting that the video had been preserved, prosecutors told the court that further investigation shows "the MCC inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC."

As a result, the pertinent video "no longer exists," prosecutors wrote.

Are you saying this is untrue? Or is this an "akshually it was a data entry error not a malfunction" type of thing?

If anyone used to play Zero Hour, there is still an active community. They still have tournaments and world series. A guy called Dominator on Youtube casts it all and its a pretty entertaining blast from the past. I recommend checking out his channel.

An intelligence asset whose job was to blackmail the rich and powerful dies in his cell before he can testify when cameras stopped working and both guards fell asleep. Come on.

Smugly dismissing all conspiracy theories is as stupid as believing them all. Epstein didn't kill himself. And he didn't work for himself either.

This is so interesting to think about. Where do you see the extremely unlikely jump from non-intelligence to human-level intelligence that makes us a fluke? I think paleontology at least indicates that evolving monkey level intelligence is inevitable. We have (somewhat independently) evolved:

crows and parrots dolphins elephants chimps and orangutans octopi

Just looking more into this because is this discussion is fascinating:

- Life transitioned from uni to multicellular multiple times. Animals and land plants both evolved from single celled lineages independently. Fungi like Ascomycota and Basidiomycota went multicellular independently. Even green, red and brown algae went multicellular independently.

- Ctenophores (comb jellies) might have evolved nerves independently. Some sponges and placozoans have cells that perform coordinated, nerve‐like functions. These use a different genetic and cellular toolkit that synapses and seem to be an independent evolution.

- Octopi evolved brains independently of us. Our last common ancestor just had a primitive nerve net.

So at least the path from unicellular life to monkey/octopus level intelligence doesn't seem like a fluke at all to me. It seems like even on the same planet the major transitions occur repeatedly and independently.

The jump from monkey to human happened so fast that indicates to me its not vanishingly unlikely. (Monkeys as smart as chimps are thought to have evolved 15-20M years ago). You might say octopi and birds are older and haven't evolved but they didn't have hands to take advantage of their intelligence and create a positive feedback loop.

I'm trying to imagine where evolution and super-intelligence seem irreconcilable. Maybe it's the jump from monkeys to the Homo genus, where brain size first started to run away? I think its clear how increasing brain size can confer an advantage there once the stage is properly set. Chimps already had complex social dynamics and rudimentary tool use. We even see initial phases of modestly increasing brain size with the Australopiths that preceded Homo. However our hominid lineage is the only one that did have an increasing brain size.

Is it the progression from early Homo to us? That seems like a natural and inevitable progression once the process started.

Smoothing out messy data from an eye tracker into a smooth gaze path.

I think we're making orthogonal points.

I agree that life is very unlikely on any given earth-like planet. And most life out there is probably of the unicellular sort.

I also don't think its guaranteed that humanity will last beyond the point we can 3D print an antimatter supersoaker.

I am just saying that out of 50 sextillion chances, I bet enough planets evolved human level intelligence that at least one made it to the singularity. And given that most rolls of the dice happened billions of years ago, whatever the singularity turns into exists already, and has for billions of years.

I don't think this is optimistic in the slightest, I think its a very sober reading of the probabilities. I would actually say that thinking we're unique is the optimistic point of view.

But I think that what I'm saying feels optimistic because its contrarian, and its contrarian because our intuitions just aren't calibrated to reason through this sort of thing. A lot of it is because of our fiction. We imagine green space men because that's what actors dressed up in suits can portray. We imagine aliens like ourselves, don't find that, and conclude there aren't any of any sort. We imagine other civilizations out there to be contemporaneous with ourselves and on the same timeline because that's all we've ever seen. And we can't grapple with numbers like 50 sextillion because we're evolved to count bananas. But if you think about the odds we're the only intelligent life that evolved and just reason through it using numbers, how can you think we're alone? There are only 100ish atomic elements that matter. They're all pretty common. Our star is very average. The Earth is a pretty pedestrian rocky planet. The Milky Way is pretty average. Life emerged relatively quickly after the planet cooled (on an astronomical imescale). The fact that we look out into space and don't see anything means diddly squat because we can only observe 5 earth-like planets/moons out of 50 sextillion. But we feel alone and unique because we're evolved to assume that all we see is all there is.

I'm talking about the end-state of super-evolved lifeforms with runaway intelligence, like humanity. Imagine how humanity will change over the next million years. We will become like Q from Star Trek TNG - beings that are essentially godlike and that transcend the need for bodies, however tiny, and that can project themselves instantly anywhere. Beings that are immortal and beyond the need to replicate, and have somewhat inscrutable goals for involving themselves with lesser lifeforms. Therefore that is what other lifeforms evolved into on some of the other 50 sextillion habitable planets, only billions of years ago. That is the kind of life that I am saying surely now fills the universe. Whatever its nature, it is statistically certain that it exists and is omnipotent, and at the very least permits you the space to exist. I would even say it is certain to be infinitely curious and is aware of us. Perhaps such advanced life is compassionate, wants you to grow, and abhors waste and death. Perhaps it sees you like a rose in a garden. Perhaps its an agent of some deeper level of existence you aren't privy to which would explain phenomenon like commonalities in near death experiences, or children that remember their past lives.

That was beautifully written.

There are an estimated 50 sextillion (5*10^22) habitable earth-like planets in the observable universe. On average they're 1.8 billion years older than Earth. Think about the implications of this for a minute. We don't see green space men, but that's not how we would expect life forms billions of years more advanced than us to appear. The entire universe must be suffused with intelligence, and if that's so, doesn't that suggest there is more to life than what you see on the surface? I find this conclusion inescapable when considering the size and age of the universe. There is more to life than meets the eye. How could it be otherwise?

You would have to put a lot of trust in that company. To be honest, I mean.

Yeah they will still learn something even if it is overnight. So will the listeners. After all, what really is the point of debate? To visibly win?

Take this example:

A human googles "how much does a tire cost?"

They pick out a website from search results, then nav within it to the correct product page and maybe scroll until the price is visible on screen.

Google captures a lot of that data on third party sites. From Perplexity:

Google Analytics: If the website uses Google Analytics, Google can collect data about user behavior on that site, including page views, time on site, and user flow.

Google Ads: Websites using Google Ads may allow Google to track user interactions for ad targeting and conversion tracking.

Other Google Services: Sites implementing services like Google Tag Manager or using embedded YouTube videos may provide additional tracking opportunities

So you can imagine that Google has a kajillion training examples that go: search query (which implies task) -> pick webpage -> actions within webpage -> user stops (success), or user backs off site/tries different query (failure)

You can imagine that even if an AI agent is super efficient, it still needs to learn how to formulate queries, pick out a site to visit, nav through the site, do all that same stuff to perform tasks. Google's dataset is perfect for this, huge, and unparalleled.

You're very welcome to! Please do. You can reach out to notpricedinyet@gmail.com