My car got broken into in Oakland, California. Multiple pieces of luggage stolen (yes, my fault for leaving it in the car in the first place). Luckily I had an AirTag that showed the exact location of the stolen items. I called the police but they said they couldn't do anything. Apparently, even if I had the location the thief would have to invite them in. Regardless, I was put on a waiting list, they finally called me back 3 days later. I promptly left the state a few months later.
Ahem. There are neighborhoods in the US where you leave nothing in your car because otherwise your car will become a target. It's often "the rule" in these places that you also leave the doors unlocked because that way "they" won't break your window trying to get in. They open the door, see there's nothing of value to steal and move on. In other places in the US it's (still but fading) normal to leave your car doors unlocked because "everybody knows everybody and no one would steal from each other." Code switching is knowing which of the neighborhoods you are in and how to adapt.
I totally get and respect the perspective of the parent poster, I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society. If it were, we wouldn't have disclosures and disclaimers and limits of liability for everything we do all day long.
>I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society.
Completely false, you mean Urban areas are not high trust.
I live in a place (In the US) where kids walk to school, don't lock bikes and our downtown has free umbrellas to take and give back whenever there is rain.
You can also do that in high-functioning societies. In Japan people leave their purses, phones, etc to hold their seat before ordering in a café, going to the bathroom, etc.
In Japan, there's so little crime that they make an effort to crack down on things like creepshots. The desire to tackle stuff like that is more than most countries do, where it's swept under the rug and ignored.
In America, you can proudly say you grope and molest women and it's considered presidential behavior.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The subways during rush hour are packed liked sardines - nothing like the US. Groping or not, women do not want to necessarily be squished from all sides by men.
For what it's worth, everything was in a locked truck with no visible way of seeing any items.
From what I heard from others, apparently the thieves have a device that allows them to detect electronics (I had two laptops, cellphone, and a few other devices). I'm not sure how accurate this is, but i'm not sure why my car was the only one on the street that was targeted as there were no visible signs of valuables in the car (nothing visible from windows etc.) Funny part is a few weeks later nothing was found except for my Kindle which a kind citizen found and returned to me. Apparently thieves don't like to read?
Fault doesn’t necessarily imply guilty.
People need to understand that.
“I should have known better” means while I am not guilty of what happened to me, I could have avoided it by not doing X. So, the real world is messy, and next time I will ac accordingly for my own good.
It is not smart to die or have your things subtracted just because you want to make a point of how things should be, a point that nobody will care about.
I grew up in a small city in the US and was taught early on to never leave any property in view in your car. The US also has a worse issue than other parts of the world because people often leaves guns in their cars.
Not made up at all. In large parts of the US people leave guns in their cars all the time. It ends becoming one of if not the largest source of stolen guns.
> did you feel really smart putting that totally made up "because people often leaves guns in their cars" in there?
I can’t tell if you think people obviously do leave guns in their car, and GP should know better than add the phrase in, or, that nobody does, and GP should know better.
I can tell you have seen people do both in different parts of the country.
You obviously didn't Google this, since there are states in America where the people are PROUD to show off the guns and gun racks in their trucks. Yes, they proudly display these guns. (Texas, looking at you)
Sure but in a less broken society thieves would be apprehended and theft risk would be low. Instead the police do nothing and honest people live like a school of fish trying not to stick out for fear of the nearly-authorized property theft rampant in SF.
In many parts of the world, including major cities, it would be okay to leave your belongings in a locked car.
I regularly leave my backpack with my laptops in it in the front seat of my car in the south US and nothing has ever happened in ten years of doing this.
It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.
Shared this in another comment, but my luggage was in a locked truck, nothing visible from the back windows. They broke in by smashing the windows, unlocking the door and using the latch to fold the back seats down to expose the trunk.
I imagine they see it the way I do: the SF Bay Area has thieves like this because it's part of local native culture. You get the good with the bad. Sort of like going to the elephant graveyard and being eaten by hyena pack. Sure, it's not your fault for walking around graveyard and getting eaten by hyena. But this is where hyena is. I have lost (and sometimes recovered) many items to these hyena. Ultimately, they are not people or anything. They're like hyena. You don't say it is fault of hyena. It is animal and local culture is animal lover. Why stress about it? Like many, GP decided that he leave hyena here and go elsewhere where it is people and not animal.
But the thieves actually are people, not "wildlife". And there is no reason to tolerate this kind of quality-of-life crime. Nobody is better off for it.
One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
It’s a coastal elite view.
As for whether they’re people and not wildlife as you put it, I suspect I’m more right than you are. Some of them have almost been acquitted because after killing people while robbing them it was offered as an explanation that they are too stupid to know that killing was bad.
> Decuir and Mims were convicted last year of armed robbery, but a jury deadlocked on the first-degree murder charge, leading to this second trial… Attorneys also argued that she had a low IQ…
> One way or the other, local culture is to do this. Yes, I agree it’s a negative sum choice. But they like it. It’s the same school of thought where a prison abolitionist didn’t report her gang rape: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/why-i-didnt-report...
How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
I read that article and I can (somehow) appreciate an ideal of prison reform so strong that it precluded reporting a crime--I think anyway--however, I did not see an explanation of what sort of remedy or justice this practitioner of a belief "in the abolition of police and prisons" would prefer. What is the appropriate punishment for such a crime? This is missing in the perspective presented. There is a description of a want for the perpetrator to change but no mechanism described for forcing the person to begin to change, just a reconciliation that every situation is different enough to avoid prescribing a template solution.
In the theft context, tolerating people that steal seems to enable theft. Humans can reason and are a product of the choices they've made. One ideal of the courts is exposure to alternatives, in the case of your deadlocked murder case, there are annoying factors from my arm chair: perhaps first-degree was too high a bar, the use of IQ in a legal setting in 2023 is annoying because without knowing how it was measured it should be assumed culturally biased and pointless, what levels of decision making abrogate personal responsibility--in managing a disease or making choices that lead to finding oneself in a particular setting. The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
> How are gangs of thieves reasonably justified as part of culture? Surely civil society frowns on theft?
Theft is considered acceptable in coastal elite culture so long as it is from a multi-store chain. I haven't yet figured out how many stores transforms a chain from independent (theft-unacceptable) to corporate (theft-permitted, perhaps even encouraged). It is somewhat underspecified but at a sufficiently franchised operation, it is considered moral to steal.
> The resulting life in prison without parole sentence is probably just, but as with the Las Vegas story, I think that's up to those most affected by the crime to decide.
In this case, the person most affected did not make a statement as to his intended outcome. This is probably because he was killed in the commission of his crime, but we have no peer-reviewed studies that have proven that so we must consider it speculation.
I generally believe it is not a crime victim's fault for being a victim of a crime, and the police services need to stop saying things that perpetrate this mindset.
Victim meets with police, signs affidavit, prosecutor goes to judge with affidavit, warrant written specifically for those items only. Should be simple and even digital if we wanted it to be.
An airtag alone will never be enough for a search warrant. They are not accurate enough and don't prove any actual crime was committed (maybe someone found your looted backpack in the trash). If there was security camera footage of the theft or you knew the thief and the cops could verify where they lived, that could likely be enough.
I guess the question would be how easy it is to fake this evidence. I don't know this tech. Could I throw my airtags in someone's bag and just take that to the police station and say look here on my phone, that's where my bags are, and then it's a he said/she said? Then the airtags aren't really adding anything to just your word "they took my bag".
Local police are never supposed to deal with immigration issues anyways, it isn't in their jurisdiction and they would have to call feds in to deal with anything related to it.
Generally, a city is called a sanctuary city if they don't honor hold orders on detainees from customs and immigration, it has nothing to do with police not enforcing immigration rules, which they can't do either way.
Right. Plus local police don't have jurisdiction over immigration issues. My comment was more a reflection on how the gov generally is, sadly (and horrifically in Minneapolis etc), much more responsive to undocumented cases than actual crimes.
He’s the top comment on every AI thread because he is a high profile developer (invented Django) and now runs arguably the most information rich blog that exists on the topic of LLMs.
That’s not really reasonable to assume at all. Five minutes of research would give you a pretty strong indication of his character. The dude does not need to self-aggrandize; his reputation precedes.
Perhaps. But perhaps this era of AI slop leaves a foul taste in many people’s mouth. I don‘t know the reputation, all I see is somebody who felt the need to AI generate a picture and post it on HN. This is slop, and I personally get bad vibes from people who post AI generated slop, which leaves me with all sorts of assumptions about their character.
To clarify, they are here to have fun, they liked the joke about cow-ork (which I did too, it was a good joke), and they had an idea on how to build up on that joke. But instead of putting in a minor effort (like 5 min in Inkscape) they write a one sentence prompt to nano-banana and think everybody will love it. Personally I don’t.
If you can draw a cow and an ork on top of an Anthropic logo with five minutes in Inkscape in a way that clearly captures this particular joke then my hat is off to you.
I'm all in on LLMs for code and data extraction.
I never use them to write text for my own comments on forums so social media or my various personal blogs - those represent my own opinions and need to be in my own words.
I've recently started using them for some pieces of code documentation where there is little value to having a perspective or point of view.
My use of image generation models is exclusively for jokes, and this was a really good joke.
This really is unnecessarily harsh. As someone who's been reading Simon's blog for years and getting a lot of value from his insights and open source work, I'm sad to see such a snap dismissive judgement.
"all sorts of assumptions about [someone's] character" based on one post might not be a smart strategy in life.
I'd say is necessarily harsh. It is not as if Simon's opinions on AI were really better than others here that are as technical as his.
He is prolific, and being at the top of every HN thread is what makes him look like a reference but there are other 50+ people talking interesting things about AI that are not getting the deserved attention because every top AI thread we are discussing a pelican riding a bike.
He very obviously disclosed that he had nano banana generate the logo. Using AI to boost himself is a different animal altogether. (The difference is lying)
This is the Internet. Everyone here is an AI running in a simulator like the Matrix. How do I know you're not an AI? How do you know I'm not? I could be! Please, just use an em—dash when responding to this comment let me know you're AI.
I’m building PaperDrop it's a research workspace that turns PDFs and new arXiv papers into something you can actually work with (notes, questions, cross paper comparisons). Would love feedback from people who read a lot of papers: https://paperdrop.xyz
It's still early prototype / beta, but wanted to share it anyway!
From the github issue referenced in the FAQ, I think they mean that because TensorFlow only natively supports CUDA, TensorFire may outperform TensorFlow on computers that have non Nvidia GPUs, such as the new MacBook Pro.
In the past, i've found that these higher level libraries built on top of TF are useful for quick model building, but should be used cautiously. By having default hyperparameters it can be easy to blindly build semi-working models without knowing what's happening. I would recommend either reading the associated papers or implementing the models in code (at least once) before using these pre-built models. That being said, i'm really excited by this project! I think it'll save researchers a bunch of time.
This is great feedback! I'd love to hear more - if you'd like to send me some examples of what you've seen in the past with pitfalls, I'd love to share them with the team.
I like their focus on flexibility. I've tried a few deep RL implementations in the past and run into issues like their DQN or A3C implementation being hardwired in a number of ways to working only on ALE, with no way to use it on other problems (eg the CNN dimensions are hardwired).
If I understand the project correctly it precisely does not advocate default hyperparameters but exposes all configurations through the declarative interface.
I may have used the term hyperparameter too loosely. Yes, this project does a good job on taking a configuration first approach, but even they set some defaults. For example, they set relu as their default layer activation function. I haven't had time to see what other such defaults are being set.
Thanks for your feedback! To clarify our philosophy regarding default configurations: On the one hand, we try to make all hyperparameters and settings of the agents/models centrally configurable, by specifying one configuration object/file. On the other hand, we try to provide a set of default values, where it makes sense for the applied user, for whom the full range of hyperparameters is probably not interesting. In doing so, we try to combine "the best of both worlds", but sometimes that might lead to conflicts. This is something we're actively working on, to get the balance right (and comments are very welcome, best on GitHub).
Bannon responded: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” he didn’t finish his sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
> While Bannon didn’t explicitly say anything against immigrants, he seemed to hint at the idea of a white nationalist identity with the phrase “civic society.”
That seems like a pretty big jump from him citing a common stat to Verge accusing him of calling for a white nationalist state. He didn't say anything close to that.
He may hold nationalist ideas where he wants more American's founding good companies domestically. But I'm not really seeing where he is calling for a white society or for an end of Asians starting companies? It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the US tech industry in addition to Asians?
From someone outside of the industry it may be a rational concern question to ask why there aren't more Americans starting those top companies? You can ask that and be concerned about that while not being characterizing the problem as Asians taking some fixed amount of jobs.
The insistence of people to fill in all the blanks of everything Steve Bannon doesn't say with some generic white supremacist viewpoint is really strange to me. Like there's an attempt to discredit any of his ideas by associating them with white nationalism. Usually by cherry picking statements and inventing a bunch of implied underlying meaning - that may or may not actually exist - to fill in the gaps until a narrative is complete. It's actually quite brilliant from a partisan character assassination perspective.
Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist might speak in code. This is similar to the way someone might speak in code when discussing criminal activity, since it's illegal to surveil non-criminal discussion. The question in court is whether a reasonable person would interpret a conversation as normal speech or criminal code. "The eagle flies at midnight," is obvious code. Other speech is not so clear.
> It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the tech industry in addition to Asians?
First, Asians can be and often are Americans.
Second, why would Bannon bring up this point that more "Americans" should be successful founders? Is it that our schools are failing? No, because Asians attend the same schools. Ah, I've got it. Perhaps there's a cultural problem with white anglo-saxon protestants: anti-intellectualism and anti-education. Is that what Bannon is getting at?
Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist must speak in code.
You have got to be kidding me. Ok, let me play along.
Xapata is clearly a white nationalist! How do I know it? He doesn't speak in white nationalist terms! Those white nationalists need to speak in code, so the evidence is clear!
Not kidding at all. Was my comparison with drug-speak not clear? Let me try again.
Suppose I'm a nice girl. A guy just asked me if I was free to go to dinner tonight. I don't want to offend, so I say, "I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair tonight." The guy now has a conundrum. He can interpret the statement literally and ask if I'm free for dinner tomorrow night, or he can interpret it as that I do not want to eat dinner with him. Humans speak in codes and implications regularly.
In Bannon's case, we must decide what interpretation of his thought is the most plausible cause of his speech. I can come up with two options:
1. Bannon believes there's something hindering the ethnic and cultural majority from technological entrepreneurialism and we should address that problem.
2. Bannon believes the number of ethnic minorities achieving economic success will decrease the prevalence of the historically common culture. Being of that culture, he dislikes this trend.
Are there any other interpretations? What's the most plausible to you?
Not obvious at all. I thought we were sharing a frustration for the recent trend in politics to make implications rather than explicit statements.
I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess. It's reasonable to expect that different people will make different guesses.
>I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess.
Why are you guessing at all? Why are you assuming he isn't saying what he means?
A generous interpretation of Bannon would be that he simply wants to see more domestic workers founding successful tech companies. He might see these statistics not as a reason to get rid of ethnic minorities, but rather as a sign that something about American culture is discouraging Americans from entrepreneurism.
Why would he not finish his thought to clarify that Americans are not as entrepreneurial as Asians? That seems like an easy thing to say if that's what he meant.
It's possible he didn't think it needed clarification. This discussion took place within effectively a far-right echo chamber where everyone was already more or less on the same page. It's also possible he didn't even feel very strongly about this point to begin with and decided he didn't like it before even finishing his sentence. It's really impossible to say. During live, unscripted discussions it's very common for someone to begin a thought, decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.
So... that page is the understanding that the majority culture suppresses the entrepreneurial spirit or are bad at math and science? If that's the echo chamber of the far-right, that's a big surprise to me.
> decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.
That's possible. Indeed it sounds like Bannon cut himself off, but more for disliking the clarity than the content of what he was saying. It sounded like he caught himself and chose to insinuate rather than elucidate.
I have a old Chromebook that I am using as my primary dev machine (at home). Was hoping to upgrade it to a MBP, but now i'm not sure. I know they are two different classes of machines, but what really struck me in that I can literally buy 10 Chromebooks for 1 MBP.
https://dho.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/Legal_RAG_Halluc...