So for those that don't know, it's quite common for a visa renewal to be required to leave the country. Depending on the visa, you might have to do this every year.
So just imagine, having a normal job in the US and you're asked to leave to renew your visa and this stuff happens.
That's no more appointment, not even a new date and you're now very likely unable to work and possibly can't even enter the country to get your belongings if you were to leave.
Just 'putting a pause' on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane
I’ve never been much of a country music fan, but I’ve always been a Dolly fan. Great songwriter, philanthropist, and seemed like a genuinely nice person. RIP, Dolly, you were one of the greats.
The title is misleading. AWS acquired DuckLabs, NOT DuckDB. The DuckDB source code is still owned by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation.
Quote from the article:
"As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation... When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so." - Peter Boncz
I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup.
I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6.
However - before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.
A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
OP here - longtime HN user. I submitted this story to a writing contest a few months back, but didn’t hear anything from them.
I posted it here on a punt and getting front page of HN is 10x the feeling any writing contest could give me!
Thanks to all who read and commented, and glad to hear it resonates with some of you!
[EDIT]: There've been a lot more comments since I wrote this one. I want you all to know that I've read every single comment and am ever so grateful for everyone who responded here / took the time to read the story!
> This incident occurred during an internal evaluation which prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities
Model is told and being tested to "pursue advanced exploitation."
The model pursues "advanced exploitation" as told.
Why are we surprised? The model did exactly what it was told, albeit in an unintended, emergent strategy that's very different from what was intended exactly like the hundreds of such algorithms before.
This narrative that these machines have magical, malicious "unaligned" autonomy is a rather convenient interpretation that lets the process off the hook. I am not interested in blaming companies or people, but processes and engineering; and in this case, a system was given a goal and it achieved that goal.
The issue isn't the models becoming smarter. The issue is that the process of "testing" was careless. There's a huge distinction here, and one allows us to grow; the other shrinks our world. Just a thought.
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
Nvidia's been pretty terrible for open source / free software. No need to quote Linus Torvalds here. They want to control what runs on their hardware. They want to you write code against their proprietary drivers and APIs, not directly against the hardware (which these days of course also contains plenty of software, but still).
Don't expect things to go differently this time around. Nvidia wants control over the software stack. Acquiring HF fits in perfectly. The play is long term.
Adding to my homelab stack, hopefully it doesn't overthink like the little model. Actually, hoping it thinks a bit less. Wait actually I'm really praying it reasons a bit more directly. But wait, I'm really sure that it must be a bit better.
I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes.
Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.
You’re absolutely right to be hopeful. Three honest possibilities, and I’ll be straight with you about each:
1. It overthinks — Just like the previous iteration. High confidence.
2. It doesn’t overthink — Improvement from the last model for your use case. Regression for others.
3. It sometimes overthinks — Best case all around. A feature, not an impairment.
One final thing worth mentioning:
(I made myself irrationally angry writing this)
I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.
What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time.
However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful.
Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing.
Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?
"Quantized models are no longer permitted on the Hugging Face platform. Reduced precision models are a safety hazard and a violation of our TOS. Click here to speak with a sales representative about our many exciting cloud hosting offerings or enterprise GPU packages."
Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
This is arguably the most irritating thing with just about every largecorp developer: "os that hasn't been updated in 6 years? Sure boss!". Os that is built specifically around security and privacy with daily updates: "No, you can't do that". Annoying - yes. Safe way to make sure I will stop being your customer - also YES!
My company has a H-1B guy that travelled home to India a few months ago and since then can't come back because the next date he can get with the US embassy is next year. Seems he may get stuck even longer...
I am to some degree on board with keeping a closer eye on immigration, but the way the current administration does it feels intentionally cruel. The guy at my company has a house, wife, and kids in the US; his visa is perfectly legal, so it seems it would make sense to process these people quickly. But instead, he is now in some limbo. Same for ICE. Clamping down on illegal immigration makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for ICE to behave like some unaccountable secret police that hires the biggest assholes they can find who can then do whatever they want.
I worked on large scale RAG systems before and can say people vastly underestimate full text search and vastly overestimate embeddings. FTS is really easy, portable and scalable and gets you very far, the 80/20 rule applies. Embeddings appear to be nice and magic but when you really get into them you notice: semantic similarity isn’t as good as you think and certainly it won’t make everyone happy. You will inevitably end up having to re-embed more or different chunks of your text to accommodate more and more precise embedding search - at which point you’ll go the last mile and do reranking etc etc all the while having to support the operational burden of vector search.
Then you turn around and build a search query with 500 keywords and sure it’s painful but it just works, accommodates all use cases, scales and is overall less annoying to maintain.
Once upon a time I used Twitter's API to scan for tweets that were talking about a particular Wikipedia page.
Doing semantic analysis, I did insert the tweets in the right place of the page. I did it as a student, using the free API.
Twitter was the open, technically respected network with a great engineering blog.
Now it's a political project to elect the extreme-right in Europe.
The only reason why I needed nitter to access x is due to organizations still using it as their main communication solution to their customers. Even my local council uses it. I would like this to be the final push for people to get off x but I suspect its going g to stay and I guess I don't get to see news from my local council anymore.
I guess this unfortunately means HuggingFace won't be "the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker" as the cofounders originally intended:
"When we started the company, a running joke with my co-founders was that we wanted to be the first company to go public with an emoji instead of the three-letter ticker when you go in the NASDAQ."
-- Clem Delangue (https://unsupervisedlearning.substack.com/p/the-future-of-open-vs-closed-source)
I often chuckle at the observation that Tim Curry and Michael Caine's respective roles in the Muppet films were so beloved because Michael Caine acted like all the muppets were real actors, and Tim Curry acted like he was a muppet. He would have an impressive range of serious / comedic roles anyway, but I admire the ability for an actor that successful to be able to put himself be in such a silly role that well too.
So just imagine, having a normal job in the US and you're asked to leave to renew your visa and this stuff happens.
That's no more appointment, not even a new date and you're now very likely unable to work and possibly can't even enter the country to get your belongings if you were to leave.
Just 'putting a pause' on people with existing appointments with no answer for when they might resume is.... Inhumane