Microsoft? Improve windows? Too little too late I say. I've switched to kubuntu and will never ever by choice go back. And I'll use what choice i have to avoid those situations which force it. It is consistently hostile to me and has been increasingly so for many years now. So I'm hostile back, fuck em. Sorry, it just makes me so upset lol

It's interesting how quick automating others out of a job turna to automating ourselves out instead

this is where true mastery is, the best DevOps guy I ever worked with told me something that stuck with me forever, “if I do my job right, I should no longer be needed on this project.” time will tell is LLMs will allow SWEs to say the same thing…

What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive. I'll just set up some burn jobs to kill tokens unnecessarily and then everyone else will too and the company will go bankrupt in 10 days. It seems inconceivable for a company to set up a "who can spend the most of our money" leaderboard for any other context

I have friends at two different companies that are taking a stick, rather than carrot, approach to this. They've set monthly minimums for token usage. Anything less than that gets you dinged in your next performance review. Imagine hiring a carpenter and writing a bad online review for them because they didn't use their hammer enough, even though the end product was on time, on budget, and worked well.

I was at a company 20 years ago that took this approach to automated tests. Everyone must write 2 a day, even if that's the only code they write that day. Once it was clear that this was being checked with automation, scripts were going around to generate and commit tests that 1 + 2 == 3 (replace with random numbers). Of course tokens are being burned this way at companies like this.

If you think this qualifies as insane, you really haven't met many managers, have you...

This is essentially companies making their engineers use LLMs as much as possible, and if you don’t, you go on a pip. Many such cases.

Go look up "Tokenmaxxing."

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

there are boards… endless boards… ranking by token usage :)

Some people like messing with cars. They take the time to understand what's happening and learn the process and pitfalls. Hobbyists wiil never be as good as trained professionally but we can still get the job done. I went through the trouble to diagnose and replace a bad alternator on my civic after the battery started dying too fast. I did it cause it was fun.

The other reason i did it is because the dealership and other shops quoted me over 10 times the cost of parts, and I literally did not have the money to take them up should i have wanted to. Car maintenance is expensive, _especially_ at the dealership.

Some how, we've changed the direction of the conversation to something you lost vs a software update to the brains of the car. I'm guessing just to make the obvious point the dealership is not the cheapest place for repair.??? This isn't change the tire or get an oil change. This is something a consumer has deliberately done to prevent the manufacture from making an OTA software update. These are the kinds of changes that I want someone available right then and there to be responsible if the update borked the car.

Sure, but you have to realize that everyone isn't you. Many people are quite comfortable messing with the deep internals of their vehicle, to the point of changing code in the ECU. Others won't even change an air filter. Takes all kinds.

You'll need to write it into your will or probate (can't remember if that's the right word) will never let it through! :)

I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.

Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!

About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).

Yep!

Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!

Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.

> How much money does it really cost?

The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...

And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.

Air pollution has a direct negative impact on everyone's quality of life, I don't see why would you chose to decouple from "food-housing-energy". Coal would still be a bad deal even if climate change wasn't a concern.

Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest

I know that in the last 5 years, we've had 3 major droughts, and in the preceding 50 years, no droughts. This is more than sufficient evidence for me.

I'm not going to argue long-term weather cycles versus man-made climate change with you.

> What have we done to mitigate that risk

Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.

Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.

> It is happening right now

We don’t actually know that.

We don’t have a second, identical Earth, where an industrial revolution powered by coal and oil and gas didn’t happen.

Maybe you don't know it. The rest of us who can read scientific work have a pretty good idea.

Are you talking about singing lessons, or actual talking training? Singing lessons helped me sing but didn't change the way i talked at all, but i was only able to afford them for a summer so maybe it takes more time than that

When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.

I'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).

I'm curious as to what prompted you to pursue this ability.

I'm trans.

The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.

There is a common enough need for this for some

Does the f0 change? Or is it like power distribution of harmonics change? Or is it something else?

More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range."

But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.

I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.

There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.

Thanks - that matches my little observations and clears up a few questions I had. I did notice that spectrogram views are almost the same regardless of perceived gender except that the strongest bands and their distributions change, and also that perceived pitch isn't as dynamic as actual frequency shifts of harmonics, but didn't realize that the center frequency moving up had to do with both physical and figurative size. It makes sense.

One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.

I feel like tl:ai would fit better because ai:dr reads, "ai, didn't read" but presumably the ai did read, while "too long, ai" fits the action better

> because ai:dr reads, "ai, didn't read"

That's not how it reads because there is a semicolon in there. It means "This is AI, so I didn't read it".

Also, I'm getting nitpicky here, but LLMs don't ”read".

> LLMs don't read

so it's ok to say "SSD read/write speed", but now that we have something closer to the original meaning of the word, someone always has to point out that "LLMs don't have a soul" (or whatever you think is required for it to count as akchyually reading)

do storage devices have souls?

If I can just stand up for the nitpicker - arguably in the uncanny valley it’s more natural to point out it’s not reading (by their definition) than outside it (ssd’s).

makes sense in a philosophical debate or when you're talking to your confused grandparents, but does anyone on hn not know how LLMs work, at least on the level of "tokens, matrices, data, sgd"?

otherwise, that reminder must imply that people do know how it works, and yet they still ascribe to these models some property like qualia, i.e. something other than "being able to turn english into code and compute into shareholder value";

but then if you disagree, why even mention it in the first place? do atheists randomly proclaim "btw god isn't real!" in unrelated conversations with strangers of unknown religious beliefs?

I read it as "ai, don't read"

In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.

Legacy admission was removed in response to affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions.

So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.

> affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration.

Affirmative action was gutted by SCOTUS when Biden was president. Not that it was popular before. California of all places rejected it by 56-44 margin in 2020.

Hmmm, that's an area of study id've never considered before. Digital Psychopharmacology, Artificial Behavioral Systems Engineering. If we accept these things as minds, why not study temporary perturbations of state. We'd need to be saving a much much more complicated state than we are now though right? I wish i had time to read more papers

Here's a neural network concept from the 90s where the neurons are bathed in diffusing neuromodulator 'gases', inspired by nitric oxide action in the brain. It's a source of slow semi-local dynamics for the network meta-parameter optimization (GA) to make use of. You could change these networks' behavior by tweaking the neuromodulators!

https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Be...

I'm not an author. I followed the work at the time.

Neuro-modulation is an extremely interesting idea for generative diffusion models.

This is kind of what Golden Gate Claude was.

A perturbation of the the activations that made Claude identify as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Similarly, in the more recent research showing anxiety and desperation signals predicting the use of blackmail as an option opens the door for digital sedatives to suppress those signals.

Anthropic has been mostly cautious about avoiding this kind of measurement and manipulation in training. If it is done during training you might just train the signals to be undetectable and consequently unmanipulatable.

> A perturbation of the the activations that made Claude identify as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Great, now we've got digital Salvia

Golden Gate Claude was two years ago and it's surprising there hasn't been as much research into targeted activations since.

There’s been some, but naive activation steering makes models dumber pretty reliably and training an SAE is a pretty heavy lift.

Right, there's a lot of research on LLM mental models and also how well they can "read" human psychological profiles. It's a cool field.

I think that was an intro to a dj dieselboy set.. beyond the black bassline. Nope, nope. Close though.

neat idea!