How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business.
A late reply to your outrage: I said I'm in favor, I'm not trying to parent your kids, but the effects of putting a phone (or similar) into most peoples' hands is easily observable and marked. I'm not limiting this to children. I observe it in my father who is 75 and I never would have imagined that he would be addicted to his phone. I observe it in myself, despite taking what most would call extreme precautions against phone addiction.
And I especially observe in my children that whatever limit I set, they will use all of it before they do anything else. I observe kids with their chins on their chest looking at a phone and I know it's not physically healthy. All I said is it's worse than cigarettes (meaning if cigarettes are regulated, phones might outta be too), and I stand by that.
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
You can't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
If you are not doing this same thing to every comment trying to remove my freedom, which then will call me some label for disagreeing with COVID policies or whatever then I can't really take any of the guidelines seriously. I was here when it was all about segregating the ones who disagreed from life, even denying healthcare while still forcing them to pay taxes.
We're way past fake politeness when the discourse is always pro war, pro xenophobia for certain acceptable targets (e.g. Russia), pro disparaging certain alleged ideologies/parties (e.g. US republican).
2020-2021 happened and there's been no apology. Till then, the biased moderation rings hollow.
I don't even know what your position or point was. It’s irrelevant. We're don't moderate for/against any side or position. We just don't have time to take that into account. The guidelines apply regardless of what you're trying to say, and we routinely get these kinds of grandiose claims about our covert motivations and biases, when the reality is far more boring: just preventing this site from turning into a flaming hellscape is a big enough task, without trying to complicate things further by promoting any particular ideology or narrative.
For what it's worth I was here behind the scenes in 2020-21, and I know very well that plenty of effort was made to give all perspectives a fair hearing.
What we're asking for is quite simple. The guidelines are a condition of participating here. A sincere effort to observe them is expected from everyone, otherwise it's fine to choose not to participate.
You realize that you're putting your "boring moderating reality" against the very real claims of goverments and people here to
- Remove people who didn't obey the house imprisonment rules during covid from society.
- Removing their jobs and ability to make a living
- Stealing their money
- Denying their ability to healthcare for any procedure
- Be put in camps permanently until they "complied" because "their body, our choice".
Once you factor that type of attack where no human rights nor Nuremberg trial result was respected, the faux civility and non bias rings absolutely hollow.
I'll try to attack their points with more faux civility like you want because staying silent is what got us there, but sometimes it may come up as more raw, since it's very easy to repeat state euphemisms to destroy people's lives but it's harder to counter permeated propaganda.
Edit: Reading my post again, it's absolutely on point. Hard to regret that. How would you write it?
Please don't try to turn this into a debate about pandemic policies. You don't know what any of us personally believed about any of it then or now, and it's nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There's no point having any guidelines or standards for the way this place operates if they change based on the particular issue of the day. The purpose of HN's guidelines is that we should be able discuss any topic, no matter how difficult, as long as we do so in the spirit of curiosity.
Outside HN there's no shortage of places where people can engage in ideological battle and vigorous protest, and I'm fully supportive of your right to do whatever you want to do to fight for the issues you believe in. Indeed, you're welcome to fight for what you believe in here too, but the way it's done on HN is through respectful conversation and persuasion, not aggression.
As for your own history here, the first time I can see moderators having to ask you to follow the guidelines is in 2014, so this pattern goes back years before the pandemic. HN is only a place where people want to come to discuss important topics because other people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down. Please be one of the ones to make this place better, not worse, otherwise you're welcome to choose not to participate here.
- I'll say goodbye for now. You've given me pause and not because I buy into the fake politeness because I think that's BS (If you may grant me that expletive).
- I think bringing 11 year old stuff (2014) without actually even putting the comment shows bad faith and an imbalance of power which tells me all I need to know not to engage further. You win. Point proven. You have power. I don't. Go pretend your world is fair and equitable but, if you have a lot of free time, do analyze how much you stopped calls for denying healthcare and putting people on camps the same way you stop someone telling others to parent their kids instead of removing their freedoms.
Even if I take the more expansive possible interpretation of “body” typically applied to vehicles, the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile.
Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? It’s so ridiculous I would be shocked to see it outside of a story intended for children or an obvious nonnative speaker of English.
>the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile.
That's a choice to limit the meaning of the term to the rigid/immobile parts of the external boundary of an object. It's not obviously the correct choice. Presumably you don't take issue with people saying planes fly. The issue of submarines swimming seems analogous.
>Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”?
I don't think I've ever had a discussion about submarines with anyone, outside of the OceanGate disaster. But this whole approach to the issue seems misguided. With terms like this we should ask what the purpose behind the term is, i.e. it's intension (the concept), not the incidental extension of the term (the collection of things it applies to at some point in time). When we refer to something swimming, we mean that it is moving through water under its own power. The reference to "body" is incidental.
It's not really a "choice" to use words how they are commonly understood but a choice to do the opposite. The point of Dijkstra's example is you can slap some term on a fundamentally different phenomenon to liken it to something more familiar but it confuses rather than clarifies anything.
The point that "swim" is not very consistent with "fly" is true enough but not really helpful. It doesn't change the commonly understood meaning of "swim" to include spinning a propeller just because "fly" doesn't imply anything about the particular means used to achieve flight.
>It's not really a "choice" to use words how they are commonly understood but a choice to do the opposite.
I meant a collective choice. Words evolve because someone decides to expand their scope and others find it useful. The question here shouldn't be what do other people mean by a term but whether the expanded scope is clarifying or confusing.
The question of whether submarines swim is a trivial verbal dispute, nothing of substance turns on its resolution. But we shouldn't dismiss the question of whether computers think by reference to the triviality of submarines swimming. The question we need to ask is what work does the concept of thinking do and whether that work is or can be applied to computers. This is extremely relevant in the present day.
When we say someone thinks, we are attributing some space of behavioral capacities to that person. That is, a certain competence and robustness with managing complexity to achieve a goal. Such attributions may warrant a level of responsibility and autonomy that would not be warranted without it. A system that thinks can be trusted in a much wider range of circumstances than one that doesn't. That this level of competence has historically been exclusive to humans should not preclude this consideration. When some future AI does reach this level of competence, we should use terms like thinking and understanding as indicating this competence.
This sub thread started on the claim that regular, deterministic code is “thought.” I would submit that the difference between deterministic code and human thought are so big and obvious that it is doing nothing but confusing the issue to start insisting on this.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by deterministic code but I do think there is an obvious distinction between typical code people write and what human minds do. The guy upthread is definitely wrong in thinking that, e.g. any search or minimax algorithm is thinking. But its important to understand what this distinction is so we can spot when it might no longer apply.
To make a long story short, the distinction is that typical programs don't operate on the semantic features of program state, just on the syntactical features. We assign a correspondence with the syntactical program features and their transformations to the real-world semantic features and logical transformations on them. The execution of the program then tells us the outcomes of the logical transformations applied to the relevant semantic features. We get meaning out of programs because of this analogical correspondence.
LLMs are a different computing paradigm because they now operate on semantic features of program state. Embedding vectors assign semantic features to syntactical structures of the vector space. Operations on these syntactical structures allow the program to engage with semantic features of program state directly. LLMs engage with the meaning of program state and alter its execution accordingly. It's still deterministic, but its a fundamentally more rich programming paradigm, one that bridges the gap between program state as syntactical structures and the meaning they represent. This is why I am optimistic that current or future LLMs should be considered properly thinking machines.
LLMs are not deterministic at all. The same input leads to different outputs at random. But I think there’s still the question if this process is more similar to thought or a Markov chain.
They are deterministic in the sense that the inference process scores every word in the vocabulary in a deterministic manner. This score map is then sampled from according to the temperature setting. Non-determinism is artificially injected for ergonomic reasons.
>But I think there’s still the question if this process is more similar to thought or a Markov chain.
It's definitely far from a Markov chain. Markov chains treat the past context as a single unit, an N-tuple that has no internal structure. The next state is indexed by this tuple. LLMs leverage the internal structure of the context which allows a large class of generalization that Markov chains necessarily miss.
Analyzing the typing experience in vim by looking at pure keystrokes would be a mistake if you don't understand the tradeoffs and benefits of having a modal system and operating the editor without leaving the home row or needing a mouse.
Good remappings/config would also significantly alter your experience.
In the example, why would you even move with single chars and not words or to the end of line? I think it's definitely a poor example because the point of the diagram/investigation is not clearly described.
> In the example, why would you even move with single chars and not words or to the end of line?
If you expand the "Scope" section you'll see more examples. The reason the initial example is restricted is probably because of how noisy those other graphs are when all (or more) movement commands are available. They make poor initial examples.
Noted. Probably the best thing would be simplified color coding in separate graphs showing 3 types of movements from worse to more efficient. And a good statement around what's the point.
Conveying information through images is all about making something understood, not about graph completeness.
I love waymo but I think people rushing to defend this are making a mistake. It should come at a high cost to the company, if they make any sort of tragic mistake like this such that they invest a lot to not commit it again.
Otherwise it's a slippery slope of "well but it's generally good"
Code format and conventions are not the problem. It's the complexity of the change without testing, thinking, or otherwise having ownership of your PR.
Some people will absolutely just run something, let the AI work like a wizard and push it in hopes of getting an "open source contribution".
They need to understand due diligence and reduce the overhead of maintainers so that maintainers don't review things before it's really needed.
It's a hard balance to strike, because you do want to make it easy on new contributors, but this is a great conversation to have.
It's ridiculous, usually fake and hide the biases of those who nurtured them to believe whatever they believe, even if it's by pure imitation.
So you're absolutely right to call BS.