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2023-05-28

Tarkovsky's films online for free

  • Mosfilm, one of the largest USSR film studios, has uploaded full-length versions of many highly acclaimed and influential films on YouTube for free.
  • The selection includes six films by Andrei Tarkovsky, which appear on Sight and Sound's 2022 list of the best 100 movies of all time.
  • The films available for free streaming include Stalker, Solaris, Ivan's Childhood, The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and The Passion According to Andrei.

Industry Reactions

  • Hacker News users recommend watching Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker," "Solaris," and "The Mirror".
  • Users discuss Tarkovsky's focus on art, poetry, mood, and time in his films.
  • Tarkovsky faced interference from the Soviet government, but his work continues to influence modern film and video games.

Scar tissues make relationships wear out (2013)

  • Relationships are hard to maintain, both personal and professional.
  • Scar tissues, i.e., accumulated little annoyances, are the primary reason for failing relationships, not a single catastrophic event.
  • Zero lingering animosity is necessary to prevent scar tissues from building up in a relationship. Communication, compromise, and both parties' willingness to listen and compromise are essential to maintain a long-term relationship.

Industry Reactions

  • The post discusses the idea of preventing "scar tissue" in relationships through regular communication and confrontation of problems, leading to personal growth and open communication.
  • Commenters discuss the importance of validating feelings, addressing issues early on, using non-violent communication, and focusing on shared values, commitment, and trust for relationship longevity.
  • The author emphasizes the importance of empathy, compromise, and respect, and the accumulation of small issues that can lead to relationship breakdown.

Reflections on Ten Years Past the Snowden Revelations

  • The memo reflects on the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's activities on security, privacy, and human rights.
  • The authors provide different perspectives on the situation while analyzing the historical context and the progress made in privacy and security.
  • The IETF and broader Internet technical community have been working towards improving security and privacy, with significant progress made, but there has been push-back from naysayers.

Industry Reactions

  • Reflections on ten years past the Snowden revelations, with discussions around government overreach and the need for transparency.
  • Importance of discussions about privacy, transparency, and government power in the tech world.
  • Intelligence agencies' immense power and access to vast amounts of citizens' information, leading to concerns about government-controlled AI and surveillance.

Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused

  • Lawyer and law firm face sanctions after submitting court documents that cited fake cases from a fake database created by an AI language generator named ChatGPT.
  • Lawyer and the person who introduced him to ChatGPT are required to appear in court, highlighting the need for human oversight in AI-powered legal research.
  • Some critics argue that courts may have to start holding virtual hearings.

Industry Reactions

  • ChatGPT language model cited fake cases leading to discussions on its limitations and the accuracy of language models
  • Concerns raised on the accountability and regulation of language model creators and the responsibility of the users
  • Debates on philosophical concepts such as consciousness and intelligence and the need for standardized practices in handling AI-generated information, specifically in the legal profession.

Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust

  • Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, which is a programming language.
  • Servo's layout engine, called Layout, was rewritten in 2020.
  • Recent improvements to Servo's testing process have made it easier for developers to contribute.

Industry Reactions

  • Rust and Servo are closely related, with Rust being developed alongside Servo and using Servo as its application.
  • There are alternatives to the current web stack, such as Svelte, Astro, and Gemini, that offer lightweight and low-power solutions.
  • Servo was essential to the early development of Rust, and it is working on improving its Layout 2020 to support flexbox, grids, and a reliable float implementation.

Building a Personal VoIP System

  • The Tech Times editor wrote a guide on setting up a personal VoIP system using open-source tools, aimed at self-hosting experts unfamiliar with VoIP.
  • The guide explains SIP, NAT problems, and potential solutions and goes into detail about configuring an Asterisk server.
  • The article includes creating SIP accounts, using a ringall queue, accessing voicemail recordings, and writing a dialplan with syntax and examples.

Industry Reactions

  • Article discusses building a personal VoIP system using Raspberry Pi and FOSS solutions with advice on security and backup
  • Community discussion offers additional resources for exploring the topic, with some users using decade-old hardware and others opting to use external services
  • Discussion includes quality of different phone types, creating intercom systems for residential spaces, and frustration with lack of IPv6 support in VoIP providers in the US

ChatGPT conversations can be shared publicly

  • Hacker News is a social news website focused on technology, startups, programming languages, computer science breakthroughs, and broader societal implications of these areas.
  • Users submit stories and the community upvotes them. The highest-voted stories appear on the front page, ensuring that they get the most visibility. The site also supports comments on each story, where a lot of insightful discussion takes place.
  • The Hacker News community is typically tech-savvy, including software engineers, tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, digital nomads, data scientists, and more. The users are knowledgeable, and the level of discourse is generally quite high, with a focus on respectful, thoughtful discussion.

Industry Reactions

  • OpenAI's ChatGPT now allows for public sharing of conversations, but it records the conversations, which is a privacy concern for some users.
  • Sharing conversations can be useful for training AI models and analyzing social feedback, but some users criticize repetitive and predictable responses.
  • There is a discussion on the limitations and potential of language models like ChatGPT, including suggestions to improve output for non-English languages and requests for embeddable iframes for shared conversations.

Oxidizing OCaml: Locality

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Industry Reactions

  • Jane Street proposes a new feature in OCaml called unboxing to optimize memory usage
  • Company plans to upstream all of its work from its branch of the OCaml compiler
  • Discussion ensues surrounding the language's usability, readability, and syntax choices in the comments section

Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach by Udi Manber [pdf]

  • Jane Street's feature "exclave" optimizes away heap allocation, decreasing allocation time.
  • The feature works with OCaml's current mode system, making struct fields record local mode if not captured during construction.
  • OCaml's type system safety guarantees make it preferred by Jane Street.

Industry Reactions

  • "Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach by Udi Manber [pdf]" received positive comments as a beginner-level text on teaching algorithm design and problem-solving.
  • Experts agreed that "CLRS" is not suitable for beginners as the book is math-heavy and requires prior knowledge of algorithms.
  • There are criticisms towards "CLRS" authors for hiding critical content in exercises and implying an elitist gatekeeper attitude towards the readers.

Hard stuff when building products with LLMs

  • Honeycomb has released Query Assistant, a tool that uses natural language to respond with a Honeycomb query.
  • Query Assistant faces challenges with larger inputs and schema sizes that exceed the LLM's context window.
  • LLMs are slow and require additional attention to compliance and data privacy.

Industry Reactions

  • Honeycomb.io discusses the challenges of building products with LLMs, which provide accessibility to users but have accuracy problems.
  • Developers share tips and best practices for integrating LLMs into complex products, including managing costs, handling LLM failures, and leveraging their full potential.
  • OpenAI's use of embeddings shows promise for creating more complex queries, but there are pros and cons to its implementation.