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> Food security is the first concern for every society, because without food we will all die.

It depends on what you mean by "first concern". Water security is the first concern by that reasoning; nuclear attack security too - without it, everyone dies.

But those aren't serious concerns in any practical sense: In most places in Europe there is plenty of water and food, and attention and resources are rightfully directed elsewhere.


'Self-reliance' is an emotional appeal by nationalists to roll back free trade and other international cooperation.

International cooperation brings great wealth and security, and a diversification of resources. Should each EU country also go it alone? Internationalists have built the most free, prosperous, and secure world that has ever been seen. It's hard to see how the recent nationalist, anti-trade governments have improved things for themselves or for the world.


> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?

Would adopting the OP put you in a different position?


The problem is not the Internet but the author and those like them, acting like social network participants in following the herd - embracing despair and hopelessness, and victimhood - they don't realize they're the problem, not the victims. Another problem is their ignorance and their post-truth attitude, not caring whether their words are actually accurate:

> What if people DO USE em-dashes in real life?

They do and have, for a long time. I know someone who for many years (much longer than LLMs have been available) has complained about their overuse.

> hence, you often see -- in HackerNews comments, where the author is probably used to Markdown renderer

Using two dashes for an em-dash goes back to typewriter keyboards, which had only what we now call printable ASCII and where it was much harder add to add non-ASCII characters than it is on your computer - no special key combos. (Which also means that em-dashes existed in the typewriter era.)


On a typewriter, you'd be able to just adjust the carriage position to make a continuous dash or underline or what have you. Typically I see XXXX over words instead of strike-throughs for typewritten text meanwhile.

Most typefaces make consecutive underlines continuous by default. I've seen leading books on publishing, including iirc the Chicago Manual of Style, say to type two hypens and the typesetter will know to substitute an em-dash.

How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?

What is "latent space"? I'm wary of metamagical descriptions of technology that's in a hype cycle.

its a statistical term, a latent variable is one that is either known to exist, or believed to exist, and then estimated.

consider estimating the position of an object from noisy readings. One presumes that position to exist in some sense, and then one can estimate it by combining multiple measurements, increasing positioning resolution.

its any variable that is postulated or known to exist, and for which you run some fitting procedure



I'm disappointed that you had to add the 'metamagical' to your question tbh

It doesn't matter if ai is in a hype cycle or not it doesn't change how a technology works.

Check out the yt videos from 1blue3brown he explains LLMs quite well. .your first step is the word embedding this vector space represents the relationship between words. Father - grandfather. The vector which makes a father a grandfather is the same vector as mother to grandmother.

You the use these word vectors in the attention layer to create a n dimensional space aka latent space which basically reflects a 'world' the LLM walks through. This makes the 'magic' of LLMs.

Basically a form of compression by having higher dimensions reflecting kind a meaning.

Your brain does the same thing. It can't store pixels so when you go back to some childhood environment like your old room, you remember it in some efficient (brain efficient) way. Like the 'feeling' of it.

That's also the reason why an LLM is not just some statistical parrot.


> It doesn't matter if ai is in a hype cycle or not it doesn't change how a technology works.

It does change what people say about it. Our words are not reality itself; the map is not the territory.

Are you saying people should take everything said about LLMs at face value?


Being dismissive of technical terms on hn because something seems to be a hype is really weird.

It's the reason why I'm here because we discuss more technically about technology


I wasn't dismissive, just wary. As a new account, it's odd to be lecturing people on behavior. You're the one diverting the conversation.

I'm in hn for 10 years.

I spend too much time here and decided to delete my account to interact less.

It's partially working though


> A proof that Terence Tao and his colleagues have never heard of?

Tao et al. didn't know of the literature proof that started this subthread.


there is an immense amount of stuff out there on ArXiv that no one has ever looked at

Right, but someone else did ("colleagues.")

No, they searched for it. There's a lot of math literature out there, not even an expert is going to know all of it.

Point being, it's not the same proof.

Your point seemed to be, if Tao et al. haven't heard of it then it must not exist. The now known literature proof contradicts that claim.

There's an update from Tao after emailing Tenenbaum (the paper author) about this:

> He speculated that "the formulation [of the problem] has been altered in some way"....

[snip]

> More broadly, I think what has happened is that Rogers' nice result (which, incidentally, can also be proven using the method of compressions) simply has not had the dissemination it deserves. (I for one was unaware of it until KoishiChan unearthed it.) The result appears only in the Halberstam-Roth book, without any separate published reference, and is only cited a handful of times in the literature. (Amusingly, the main purpose of Rogers' theorem in that book is to simplify the proof of another theorem of Erdos.) Filaseta, Ford, Konyagin, Pomerance, and Yu - all highly regarded experts in the field - were unaware of this result when writing their celebrated 2007 solution to #2, and only included a mention of Rogers' theorem after being alerted to it by Tenenbaum. So it is perhaps not inconceivable that even Erdos did not recall Rogers' theorem when preparing his long paper of open questions with Graham in 1980.

(emphasis mine)

I think the value of LLM guided literature searches is pretty clear!


This whole thread is pretty funny. Either it can demo some pretty clever, but still limited, features resulting in math skills OR it's literally the best search engine ever invented. My guess is the former, it's pretty whatever at web search and I'd expect to see something similar to the easily retrievable, more visible proof method from Rogers' (as opposed to some alleged proof hidden in some dataset).

Also, isn't OCLC focused on the mission of libraries, which is to distribute knowledge? What is their attitude toward services like Anna's, which accomplishes that mission much better than any OCLC member?

These so called charities have to justify their executives' seven figure salaries somehow. If someone is doing their job better without all the embezzling executives people may start asking inconvenient questions.

The CEO's compensation in 2024 was $1.3 million.

That is seven figures, no?

Indian River State College in Port St. Lucie and Fort Pierce, Florida is an OCLC member.

Their kids section is always busy.

They provide more than just books to patrons, one of their projects provides rentable backpacks with food making kits:

(Sorry about the Facebook link)

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=789082493879103&vanity=IRS...

Cooking together provides an educational and bonding opportunity for kids and caretakers, and nutrition is important. Making it easier is a win to me.

We can be annoyed at the actions against Anna's and also celebrate OCLC members and physical libraries.

I appreciate I'm just replying to a off-hand comment, so I'm sorry for the next part.

I will be battling my family for decades about IP and how they are relying on it instead of first mover advantage and the IQ we had today and yesterday. And how it changes cultural values around sharing. It's not good. I know we probably agree on that, so that part isn't directed at you, just the future.


Thank you for sharing your direct experience, which is always valuable.

> We can be annoyed at the actions against Anna's and also celebrate OCLC members and physical libraries.

I didn't mean to say otherwise. And I think 'annoyed' is insufficient for anyone who can influence OCLC. Too much is at stake to be bystanders.

Free and unlimited distribution doesn't need to be the answer, but look what happened to the Internet Archive's lending library, for example. There are other solutions too, such as micropayments. Shutting down online access to books is immoral and damaging to society, the economy, and the people of the world.


because The Mission is making money, too.

Exactly, Pournelle's law in full force.

The fact that such an organization is focused on the inverse of the mission one would expect should tell people more than enough. Unfortunately, most people simply rely on their preconceived notions about most things, even when faced with a stark contrast in reality.

I can tell you from direct contact with many of these “library organizations” that they are all totally corrupted. All you have to do is accept that premise just for a second and you will realize that it causes all the contradictions to explain themselves.

And all the corruption originates in the local/state library level, the government funding of libraries.

When there is a trough of government spending guaranteed, of course the scoundrels come out to feast, amidst a barrage of emotionally manipulative arguments narratives, usually centered around helping children.

Reality is that the whole library sector is an industry and it’s extremely corrupt, but that’s how the directors and executives like it, as they get rich from those public funds people are forced to pay against their will… for the children, of course.


> Specifically, the site’s operator and these third parties are prohibited from scraping WorldCat data, storing or distributing the data on Anna’s Archive websites, and encouraging others to store, use or share this data.

I don't see how that impacts anyone but Anna's Archive. Arguably ISPs distribute the data, but how are registrars implicated?


What problem is this solving? Are there no OSes for medium embedded systems? Are they too expensive?

Key aspects from the talk iirc (I was in the audience :)):

* Real time embedded CPUs are usually without an MMU -> kernels such as FreeRTOS lack secure memory due to the lack of MMUs in those CPUs

* A kernel targeting embedded CPUs with MMUs that supports secure memory management

* Secure memory communication a there called server/client method to communicate leveraging Rust borrow checker build time for later having "user-land processes" to communicate via pages.

These things combined allow a very small kernel, with user-space implementation of usually kernel-level functionality, such as the system clock timer (presented in the talk).

All of this is meant to provide a complete trustworthy processing chain, from CPU dies that can be inspected through infrared microscopy through the CPU epoxy package/cover to the entire build/software tool chain.

The Xous OS project both takes care of the Kernel, but also the CPU/RISC-V runtime with an MMU, something that is usually quite difficult to obtain - but due to synergy effects with another chip consumer/organization they managed getting their custom processor manufactured.


Trust and transparency: https://betrusted.io

The problem is : do you trust your hardware? If not can you build, or buy, hardware that you can verify? So they built https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor with an FPGA instead of a CPU from Intel or SpacemiT and are going up and down the chain to insure that EVERYTHING can be inspected.

It's about providing the security benefits we get from MMUs (e.g. process isolation) to microcontrollers. There are no OSes for that space because basically no microcontrollers have MMUs. They had to make one for this OS.

I highly recommend watching the talk, it's very good!


There is QNX. seL4 is another.

The former is proprietary. The latter kernel is GPL2, similar to Linux.


QNX is not open source.

And seL4 is a kernel, not an OS. And it pretty hard to work with specially if you want any kind of dynamic system.


What did you mean by a dynamic system ?

One where processes, drivers and libraries come and go during the whole OS uptime.

There is Genode, which can run atop of seL4(amongst others).

https://genode.org/

https://genodians.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genode


Is that sarcastic? I'm not sure. Healthcare, food, transportation, and housing are becoming much more expensive and less affordable.

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