I think to certain people, this is viewed as a necessary trade-off to curb the political power and influence of the so-called "Professional Managerial Class" in the United States, due to fears that a version of James Burnham's prediction[1] would come true. When this discourse comes up on sites like Twitter, and people ask why we're doing it, supporters of these cuts ultimately lay the blame at the feet of two camps: Campus protesters and the response to COVID (Masking, vaccine mandates, etc). I think for some people, those things were so traumatic the entire system needed to be torn down. I think the former is mostly harmless and the latter was necessary, but the faction in power doesn't see things that way - and the dissolution of scientific power in the US is how they're going to feel secure again.
I was around 13 when I had my first migraine. A solid block of pain on the right side of my head. That occasional migraine became more frequent over the years. I had a headache 24/7 in one specific place in my head.
In my early 30's, after blood tests, food elimination, x-rays and finally an MRI I was told that I had Chronic Daily Migraines.
Most days were 6-7/10 pain. Those days that were 10/10 I perfected the art of lying down and breathing in such a way that I barely moved. Noise / light were never an issue, the pain got worse when I moved.
Then I got a daith piercing.
I had read that a daith could help.
I got the daith ~14 years ago and I have not had any sort of headache since. Both my daughters who had migraines got a daith and they too have no headaches.
I get the sample size is not useful, but if you have migraines, go into your local proper piercing studio and ask for a daith - they will almost certainly reply "On which side of your head is the pain?"
My wife and I always say that the most dangerous show on television is "House Hunters International".
"I need a 3 bedroom apartment with a full kitchen in the village center, with at least parking for one car, I have a budget of $300/mo".
"Here's at least three options"
It also bring up a kind of discomfort between us, as tech workers, and regular people. The quantity of money we can earn, even at the lower end in the U.S., is unfathomable. It makes us want to go places and spend somewhat frivolously to support local businesses.
We were recently in Portugal. There's a ton of trendy food spots with prices near what we'd pay in HCOL U.S., but there's a ton of really local, mom 'n pop places, with absolutely incredibly prices, and they're incredibly appreciative of your business.
One place we frequented was maybe a 30 second walk from a very trendy tourist district, but served local food at very local prices. Ubers were lined up to drop people to go overpay for mediocre food in the district, literally on the street next to where we were eating. If they would have just taken a moment, they could have come and had a great relaxed meal and support some locals for almost next to nothing.
Growing up in Russia in the 90s, assassinations (usually of folk associated with various organized crime groups, but also the occasional journalist or politician) were fairly common. As I recall, usually the person would get shot with some common weapon - often milsurp TT - somewhere in their daily routine where there aren't people around, e.g. on the stairs in their apartment building. But sometimes you did get more spectacular hits; there was that one time when a local crime boss was shot with a rifle while dining in a restaurant, through the window.
Android defaults to sending the IMSI (SIM ID) to Google.
> SUPL is used as part of the A-GPS (Assisted GPS) system to get a faster Time to First Fix. The problem is that Android's implementation automatically sends the IMSI (ID of the SIM card) to the SUPL provider for no apparent reason. And because Google is the default provider it's a big breach of privacy.
Is this news? I've got a nearly year old app that supports over 2 dozen local LLMs with support for using them with Siri and Shortcuts. I added support for Llama 3 8B the day after it came out and also Eric Hartford's new Llama 3 8B based Dolphin model. All models in it are quantized with OmniQuant. On iOS, 7B and 8B ones are 3-bit quantized and smaller models are 4-bit quantized. On the macOS version all models are 4-bit OmniQuant quantized. 3-bit Omniquant quantization is quite comparable in perplexity to 4-bit RTN quantization that all the llama.cpp based apps use.
The issue, for anyone tempted by it, is not that our current chatbots are biased and some future iteration will not be. Creating an unbiased answer to all questions is impossible. People don’t agree on many important questions, and even if the answer tried to give equal weight to all perspectives, that would mean giving weight to fringe opinions.
It’s the same thing with image generators. How many eyes should the average generated person have? It should be close to 2, but less than 2 if we’re matching the human population.
The solution that these companies will inevitably reach for is an extension of filter bubbles. Everyone gets their own personalized chatbot with its own filter on reality. It makes the culture warriors happy but it will only make things worse.
While it’s never been officially proven, there is a interesting story behind truecrypt. It was allegedly written by one guy (Paul Le Rou) who was a programmer turned cartel boss/gun/drug runner.
But back to your question, truecrypt was professionally audited and deemed “secure”, some issues were found but none that were back doors or significant. Shortly after(might have even been during) the audit truecrypt deleted all old versions and posted a weird message telling people to use bitlocker.
After some time veracrypt picked up the torch and has continued developing what was truecrypt.
JTX Board, it's an Android app for tasks, notes, and journals, it uses iCalendar to store all the data, and integrates with DAVx⁵ to sync your data to any CalDAV server, such as Nextcloud, so you can see your tasks in the Nextcloud web app, and automaticlly sync them to your PC.
I use the Nextcloud app on my KDE Plasma laptop, and it works perfectly, I only realized this works when reminders started magically showing up on my laptop without me needing to set anything up
Proliferation of inhuman impostors that emulate human communication can endanger relationships in human society.
If such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern. If people are dealing with such impostors more and more, they learn to be less thoughtful in outgoing communication.
Once this is normalized, what is there to distinguish fellow humans from chatbots? Who’s to say other humans are conscious? If consciousness doesn’t exist, why can’t other humans be abused? Why isn’t choosing to suffer over abusing a fellow human plain masochism? If your salary depends on monetizing your user base, why should you try to not do harm to them? How is death different from shutting down an LLM?
Like saying "Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!", post a coin article on HN and I shall appear ;)
A few interesting (perhaps) tidbits of nerdery:
1:
> "But when Dr. Ortega and Ms. Bravo Hualpa bombarded the 1899 coin with X-rays and measured the light it re-emitted, they determined that the dinero was largely made of copper, zinc and nickel.
This sounds extremely fancy (and technically it is), but what you may find surprising is that the technique they used (XRF eg X-Ray Fluorescence analysis) is so useful in the coin/bullion industry that you can buy handheld "XRF guns" that perform a metal composition analysis on the spot and present the readout in a very easy-to-consume way on a small LCD screen. And you can buy them on Amazon!
(They are not cheap.) But they are ridiculously useful and it feels like a magic trick to point it at a piece of metal and have an instant elemental readout. As you might guess, 99% of this is to check whether a piece of gold/silver is actually gold/silver.
2:
Unlike TFA's example, among US coins there are lots of counterfeits out there that ARE made out of the proper base metal (typically 90% gold, as much US gold coinage is composed).
Why on earth would someone do that? The answer is that in the mid-20th century, many countries (including the US) imposed restrictions on import and export of gold but had exclusions for certain types of currency. So one clever way to transport quantities of foreign gold into the United States was to make sure you were transporting exempted US currency. So many countries developed sophisticated counterfeiting techniques to turn non-US-coinage gold into US-coinage gold. This worked quite well for getting gold into the US but has been a thorn in the side of collectors here for a while, since you might buy a rare US gold coin that's actually truly made of gold and yet is still a counterfeit :(
I made a custom GPT and uploaded my books to it, and now use it for:
* A story bible (asking questions about characters, timelines, plot points, etc that I might have forgotten)
* A brainstorming tool that uses existing themes and characters for new ideas
* A rudimentary developmental editor or critic (does not replace my human dev editor, however)
* A character and environment art generator (this one is hit and miss with characters especially)
Tip for anyone doing this: make a separate GPT for each series. When I tried to upload books in two distinct series, even clearly labelled in the data, it started getting them confused. Works better to split them up.
If you want to go for a over-the-top techy solution you could do non-destructive testing with a near-infrared handheld spectrometer. It's a pretty neat technique that can determine ripeness of a lot of fruits (and properties of other materials) if that can be detected via abundance of certain molecules.
It looks though that Consumer Physics stopped selling their SCiO device that was ~$250 to consumers, and I don't know if there is any equivalent current alternative.
>the ASN is a string of asn and name, no org or country
Yeah detailed ASN information on the API level is available on paid tiers.
However, we have a free IP to ASN Country database that is updated daily and provides full accuracy. That database provides ASN, AS organization, and AS domain information.
I think the reason we don't have more ASN details on the API even though we provide more information for free in the database is because of the target audience and usability of the IP metadata.
Our API allows for tokenless API access for up to 1,000 request/day. There is no compromise with data accuracy. The goal is to be generally useful and extremely fast. Detailed ASN information is still freely accessible from the website, though. So, we have to balance out free API, free website information and paid API/database.
I have been reaching out to folks to adopt the free IP to Country ASN database, as it is free to use and provides full accuracy. If anyone wants to build a public API on top of the IPinfo free database that return more ASN information available there, they are more than welcome to that!
If anyone reading this feels like it, you could make an absolute shit-ton of money by hiring a whistleblower attorney such as https://www.zuckermanlaw.com/sec-whistleblower-lawyers/ and filing an SEC whistleblower complaint citing the various public-record elements of this improper behavior.
Whistleblower cases take about 12-18 months to process, and the whistleblower eventually gets awarded 10-30% of the monetary sanctions.
If the sanctions end up being $1 billion (a reasonable 10% of the Microsoft investment in OpenAI), you would stand to make between $100M to $300M this way, setting you and your descendants up for generations. Comparably wealthy centi-millionaires include J.K. Rowling, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary...
The way CZ managed to tie up FTX in a knot was a masterclass. (about 59min in).