I think it was when the LLM asked me a question at the end of its response. It felt like something other than a machine. Until then the pattern was me asking a question and ChatGPT giving me an answer, with or without hallucination. When it asked me a follow-up question it felt like talking to a being with agency. An entity that has thoughts or ideas or questions of its own.
I think this is probably related to which eye is more dominant for you. I've never skateboarded, but if I imagine myself doing it, it would also be facing left. And it's because my right eye is dominant and I would like that to be facing forward.
> I think this is probably related to which eye is more dominant for you.
I think it's more about a person's personal stability/biomechanics. The back foot is the stable one, forward is the "quick" lead. The preferred "plant" foot when kicking a ball is the stable one (though many people use both, so this is best used only when there is a strong preference), the one used to push off with when at the bottom of stairs or jumping is the stable one (the lead foot is the `quick` one). The best way I found to help determine footedness: have a person stand straight (feet together) walk around them (pretending to look at posture or something), once behind them push them forward (evenly with some force). Watch for which foot they catch themselves with. Thats the lead foot.
As for the eye dominance, in archery having the right eye dominant means your stance is regular (left foot forward). An archery open stance is near identical to a snowboard neutral stance (~ +15°, 0°). The 2 most important things to get right in (olympic recurve) archery is eye dominance and a proper open stance. As a goofy footed snowboarder and a right eye dominant archer, the archery stance took awhile for me to adapt too. It still feels weird.
Quick test to find out which is pick a point in the distance, make a triangle with thumbs and fingers to look through, and slowly bring it toward your face. Wherever it ends up is your dominant eye.
By "completely Nvidia-free" do you mean Nvidia wasn't used for training nor inference? Because if it's only inference, we know that Opus already can run on TPUs. Not to mention Gemini.
Yep but they don't run on Chinese hardware that is going to be available to everybody and will cost a lot less than NVIDIA stuff. So now you have a full non-US pipeline for AI, and soon they'll have the training GPUs as well.
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Obviously they have to be careful. What if they didn't check all this and someone went and tried to opt out on your behalf? That would be an incredible invasion of your privacy!
Obviously. On the other hand, your e ployer sharing your personal data against your knowledge or your will isn’t an incredible invasion of your privacy. Everything is fine citizen, move along and quit asking questions or thinking.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
> my experience with theory is that it includes time and effort considerations
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
>they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Moat is decades of process / tactic knowledge built by disproportionate amount of talent on geologic formations others didn't invest in. Right now they generate 15x mining graduates, university of mining tech alone enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. Then you throw all that into a mining city like Batou with 3 million people running vertically integrated operation. That's ecosystem scale with compounded advantages beyond "wanting" to put work in, it maybe scale on PRC has demonstrated ability to produce.
Between shallow kiddy pool and Mariana Trencth in terms of ease of replication, I wouldn't lean towards kiddy pool. I don't think "right way to characterize" their lead is "no moat" beyond... all the things that are actually, in fact very deep moats, as if any country can persevere their way to replicate decades of work and execute industrial policy of a 3 million large city dedicated to mining/rees.
I surmise, PRC will build out EUV (technical problem) and produce them at scale before west+co meaningfully tackles HREEs supply chain (technical and regulatory and industrial problem).
> they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Incorrect, de facto, the only firms invested heavily in the rare earth refineries technology are Chinese for the last 20-30 years. Their moats are as deep as TSMC moats so to say.
Processing is the thing china does, you don't really mine rare earths, they are in many areas. Sure there are substrates it's easier to extract from, but the massive pollution of the processing that china was willing to accept when others were not that allowed them to corner the market. It can be done more cleanly, the US has some processing for strategic reasons (not enough though), but doing it clean is _very_ expensive.
Lets hope the people modifying plants to concentrate elements make work.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
My dad still uses PageMaker to publish his print magazine. He's been using this program since 1987, starting with a Macintosh and then later moving to Windows in the late 1990s. RIP Paul Brainerd.
And why not? It was sufficient to publish real magazines as long as they weren't too long, and it costs a fraction of the cost of Quark. If you have a copy and it runs, keep using it.
That's not P/E. That's Price to Sales. P/E is price to earnings ratio. Earnings is profit. Since neither of these companies is profitable, they don't have a P/E ratio today.
I wonder how you think about trusting oj-hn as a vendor? The extension looks great.
I sympathize with the desire to release programs/code anonymously or semi-anonymously on the internet. I noticed you don't particularly tie the extension to any identity (unless I'm missing something).
Maybe extensions are more constrained than I realize. Specifically it looks like the manifest has "host_permissions: ['https://squeeze.oj-hn.com/*']," and then presumably the only leakable thing is private contact email or votes. Maybe the chrome api content of the tabs/history permissions also (seems silly for chrome not to scope that to the startUrls though?) Not 100% sure I'm understanding correctly though.
you're not wrong which is why i try to be transparent about it all on the homepage. good suggestion, i'll blurb myself, but i'm not looking for fame so i left that off. i just want the extension to speak for itself.
it is all open source and built by CI, including squeeze, which is just a few lines of a CF worker.
i'm also not anon and i have 16k karma here along with decades of history building open source that you're probably using on a daily basis without even knowing it (co-founder of java @ apache).
i also don't need money, so i won't ever sell this project to the highest bidder and i don't have plans or need to monetize it either. maybe add some ai features in the future that require you to put in your own api token. GPLv3 too, to prevent corporate takeover.
right now, it is just a ground up feature re-implementation of another popular HN extension that the author abandoned. i've done it with over 650 unit tests too, so it shouldn't be too buggy and stand the test of time.
ya, thank you, I recognize the history! The extension just seemed isolated from another identity. So I was wondering the thinking. I wish chrome let you scope the manifest/permissions on the user side more.
i've done my best to keep it as minimal as possible. i wish i didn't even need squeeze, but there was some block that required it and it was easier to just do it as a few lines of code. i figured as long as it is all built by CI, GPL and OSS, I'll get a pass. it is the best we can do today.
try it out, let me know what you think. i promise not to hack your hackernews.
one other thing. the best thing you can do is just run it in a separate profile than the rest of your browsing. i don't do that myself, but it would be slightly more secure that way.
Separate profiles is perfect. Not sure why I haven't been doing this. The keyboard shortcuts are wonderful and enter to open the article is so optimistic! Thank you for dragging me across the finish line. Your extension is glorious.
Edit: I liked the j and noticed it even worked elsewhere (bestcomments is when I ran into it)! None of this is requests, just reflections. Still warming up to the keyboard navigating collapsed comments behavior. Also I think I remember the original HNMarkAllRead 'hide stories' checkbox hid stories after visiting comments. (And there was a hide comments checkbox that when marked only revealed new comments since the last visit) There are lots of workflow permutations to hn!
'j' to the end of the page to go to the next page is awesome. took a bunch of ai tweaking to get all that right.
i actually did this whole multi-layered object model to wrap around the dom to enable pagination more easily. took about 2 days of coding to figure that out. doing it that way made it so that you can even refresh the page and it will 'remember' where active article is. none of the other extensions are this well thought out.
oh and left arrow to open the comments is debatable, but i kind of like it. my reading pattern is to open a bunch of tabs... right/enter to open the story and then left to open the comments... then when i have time, i go through all the 'interesting' stories.
what i'd like to do is add kind of a bookmark and tag system so that you can store what you want to read later and be able to tag it so that you can search for it. favorites is close, but it doesn't quite cover the same use cases.
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