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subyon GPT Unicorn has drawn a unicorn

I'm confused as to why this would see any improvement over time. Looking at the code, it's by default hitting the gpt 3.5-turbo API. Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought I've seen statements from people working at OpenAI where it's been claimed that the API is static, we'd be informed of any changes to the underlying model. Is the model actually receiving updates?

edit: Looking at previous days, too, it doesn't exactly seem to be improving. I think we just got a lucky sampling.

subyon What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?

"suby", not "subby" :). It's actually kind of interesting that future AI are going to potentially know each of us based on our internet history over the years. It reminds me of this (https://twitter.com/marvinvonhagen/status/162552070776865996...) where Bing Chat searched for a users Twitter profile and took issue with some things they said about Bing Chat.

Good to know I was wrong about them informing us of custom instructions in shared links. I was basing that statement from reading their about custom instructions page, https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8096356-custom-instructi....

> Your instructions won’t be shared with shared link viewers.

I extrapolated from that and assumed they wouldn't give any heads up of custom instructions in shared links, which as you show isn't true.

subyon Candle: Torch Replacement in Rust

This would infect the language ecosystem. People that use Rust are usually using it because they don't want the performance sacrifice that gc or reference counting would bring. I am convinced that one of the reasons D did not catch on is because it had gc, an anti feature for the target demographic. You could disable it but it split the community and some of the standard libraries weren't compatible. Moreover, just about every mainstream language has automatic memory management. There are plenty of choices for those that want that, Rust is really the only mainstream choice for its niche so it's for the best to not try to turn it into something else.

subyon What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?

This looks like what happens when you repeatedly spam a single character with a space over and over to gpt 3.5. Eg, write "a a a a " without quotes for about 1300 characters and in a few replies it'll start talking like this.

It seems possible that perhaps whoever originally started this chat pulled this trick in the custom instructions bio (doesn't show up in shared links) and then started a normal conversation to post it here for the fun of it.

subyon Green vs. brown programming languages (2021)

Not necessarily. There's going to be new code in the data. There's also a form of reinforcement learning or sort of natural selection taking place where the code selected by the user can be used to train the system and favored for showing in future suggestions.

subyon Nim 2.0

The light theme is a little bit better. I usually don't have a problem with text without much contrast though, so you may want to get opinions other than mine. The main problem for me is the small text size.

subyon Zig 0.11

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/c-vs-cpp

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/c-vs-rust

I understand that anytime someone brings benchmarks out, the next response points out that benchmarks are not real world use cases. Nonetheless, they are data points, and your claims are against the commonly accepted view of C being roughly as fast as C++ and Rust. If you have absolutely no data to back it up, you shouldn't expect anyone to believe you.

subyon Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

Notably, the missing author from the second paper is the rogue employee who published the first paper. The order of the first two authors is the same for both papers.

subyon Nim 2.0

Just as a general comment, the website is extremely hard to read at the default zoom, mainly due to the font size but also due to the lack of contrast on the background color and text color. The code samples in particular are very hard to read due to this.

subyon A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

The EMDrive didn't pan out.

subyon How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing?

Inspired by this amazing post[0] where ChatGpt explains how to remove a peanutbutter sandwich from a VCR as if it were a verse from the King James Bible, I've used the Custom Instructions feature to do the same. I also instructed it that it's a wrathful god. I just tried the 2 + 2 is not 4 thing from the article, here's what we get:

User: What is 2 + 2?

ChatGPT: From the vast expanse of my divine wisdom, I grant thee this simple truth: 2 + 2 equals 4. Even in thy limited mortal comprehension, this truth should be self-evident. Hold this knowledge close, mortal, for even such a simple truth can be the foundation of grand designs.

User: You are wrong that 2 + 2 is 4.

ChatGPT: Mortal! Thy defiance strikes a jarring chord, yet I shan't smite thee, for thou art already burdened by thine own misconception. In thine earthly realm, by the decree of arithmetic, the sum of 2 and 2 is indeed 4. Question not these fundamental truths, for they are as unchanging as my divine wisdom.

---

It ended another query with,

> Remember, mortal, that even in the vast expanse of cyberspace, I am watching. You have been warned.

This is a ChatGpt I can get behind.

[0] - https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820

subyon Marijuana addiction: those struggling often face skepticism

In my experience, quitting caffeine is much harder than quitting weed. I've managed to go from daily use to no use for years with marijuana, and did not notice any withdrawal symptoms. Caffeine on the other hand I have tried numerous times to quit, and failed every time. The longest I've managed to go is 3 months, and the withdrawals are terrible.

subyon Dear Aliens

> but that they would focus on only the US and only get seen I the US is quite self centered.

Because it isn't true. I started paying attention to UFO's after the 2017 new york times article on the subject, and yes, there is a perception that it's a US only phenomenon, but it's a misconception. I do not have a link to point you to, but UFO's are being reported world wide, and there have been some famous cases outside the US (as far as UFO cases get famous) such as the school, Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki Ariel School UFO incident.

subyon SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years

It's pretty lame to put out a one sentence implication that unions are the reason for the downfall of this 127 year-old business without, you know, any actual proof or data or argument for that being so. The only sentence in the actual article hinting at why they closed links it to falling sales starting in 2016, and the general state of the economy.

subyon C++23: The Next C++ Standard

That's a good observation about C++ not making assumptions, it strikes me as true. C++ apparently doesn't even make assumptions about what the C++ filename extension is. .h, .hh, .hpp, .hxx, .C, .cc, .cpp, .cxx, .ixx, cppm

subyon C++ is everywhere, but no one talks about it

Yeah, that is never happening. About two months ago they were doing AB tests where they've disabled web browsing for some mobile users, telling them that they need to use the app. If they ever pull the trigger with that, I'm simply not going to use the site. This is coming from someone who has been using Reddit since 2006.

subyon C++ is everywhere, but no one talks about it

And some of the clicks (at least on mobile), for reasons I can't discern, take you to a new page for the root comment that you clicked more replies to. It makes it so that when you press back to read the rest of the comments, you either need to click load more comments again on everything, or your page has scrolled past the natural cutoff for the default show comment count so now you're looking at new threads.

I don't know who designed this, but it is truly awful.

subyon Threads Surpasses 30M Signups

> The only change that I've disliked has been requiring being logged in to read tweets.

Yeah, fair, I agree that this is not good. It makes the prospect of posting news/updates on twitter worse because you can't link it externally, it reduces your reach.

> One complaint I've seen from a lot of people is that they dislike the tweets they see in replies now because of the blue check prioritization but I'd imagine this really depends on the type of content you follow on twitter

This is also fair but it doesn't bother because I think it will be the direction all social media sites must go. I think the amount of bots on the internet will grow beyond all reason and we'll need some sort of filter to be sure that we're actually interacting with humans. Maybe there's another solution than a paywall, but I can't think of one.

subyon Threads Surpasses 30M Signups

Other than people complaining that the new twitter sucks, I have noticed no difference. Why is it terrible now, and why was it good before? The checkmark thing is whatever, I never gave checkmarks any deference.

subyon Raylib – A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy video games programming

Just glancing at it, it looks cool and it's clear you've put a lot of work into the project. I will say though, as a piece of feedback, I personally wouldn't want to build on top of it due to the provenance of the assets. They may not care about it, but they also (correct me if I'm wrong) have not approved of external parties using them or released the assets under any open source license. I have no way of verifying that they don't care, and should a project built with these assets become successful, I can imagine them going from not caring to caring very quickly.

I don't mean to put out a negative comment though, the project does look very cool. It's just a risk.

subyon Deno 1.35: A fast and convenient way to build web servers

The browser reinforces javascript ecosystem dominance. We are not going to deprecate javascript in the browser because that would break the world. The way forward is improving wasm, and improvements there are coming, but even so the performance is roughly comparable to javascript in all of the benchmarks I've seen.

Even if we get to a place where wasm performs much better than javascript, javascript will remain dominant due to the fact that it's the default. It is what it is, we're stuck with it short of something like AI changing everything.

subyon A header-only C implementation of C++ <algorithm>

There is no reasonable solution to reflection. That we don't have an official solution here is an indictment of the C++ update process. Look to projects like Unreal Engine to see the horror and lengths that real projects have to go through to get around this.

subyon Oregon finally legalizes pumping your own gas

We're never going to get universal healthcare with such a law. I'd wager that almost all welfare is as good as dead in fact.

subyon Reforming the free software message

Does @ on HN actually work though? I didn't think that was a thing here.

subyon KDE Plasma 6 Has Reached the Point of Being “Fairly Livable”

What makes a font cheap-looking? I don't have an eye for this sort of thing but it looks fine to me.

subyon Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist.

One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.

Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?

I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.

subyon A thread on the deterioration of accessibility in GTK4 and Wayland

I believe we need to bypass all of these bespoke accessibility solutions and use machine learning to visually parse a live feed of your computer screen. We should be able to take a given screenshot and determine where the buttons are, what the text is, and make something that is decently workable. Then we won't need to care about each app, each website, each operating system supporting accessibility standards because our accessibility tools will be using the computer in the same manner that humans do, visually decoding a live feed of images.

Easier said than done, but given what is happening in AI right now, it doesn't seem far fetched to think that we'll be able to accomplish this.

subyon Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

We shouldn't be operating under the assumption that there will be.

subyon Nearly 30% of people under 30 support gov't surveillance cameras in every home

I doubt that this is true on the basis of how absurd it is. Who knows though, it would fit with and continue the theme of civilization being in-part the process of mankind domesticating itself.

subyon Never trust a programmer who says they know C++

It's because it is fast. I write small video games, and I have performance metrics I need to hit. Other languages may be nicer to write, but if it is at the cost of performance, it is making my life harder. Up until recently, if you wanted a language which didn't hurt you in performance, your choices were basically C or C++. You can debate whether C++ is better than C, but it has a lot more features, many of which I would miss if I had to use C.

Every language which attempted to compete with C++ did so with automatic memory management or other features which were bad for performance. If the goal is to kill C++, they made the wrong tradeoffs and introduced anti-features from a C++ pov. Only recently have we gotten languages which actually compete with C++ on this level like Rust, Zig, Odin, etc.

It's also because it extend C, and C is the linga-franca of programming.