skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From witnessing so many HN flamefests, between Go and Rust, it seems there are people who are genuinely more productive with Go than Rust, and vice versa. Not saying people usually lie when they claim to be more productive with one, but rather that their judgement is very subjective and not scientific. I do wish Go didn't have the data race bugs, though. It greatly weakens Go's "fearless concurrency" selling point for me. To me, Rust doesn't always make concurrency "fearless" in terms of complexity, but at least I'm not fearing actual memory safety bugs in a random library. There's unsafe, but I think the design tradeoff there is quite reasonable and workable.
Stock pickers are not the same as CEOs.
Yeah, he can be furious all he wants but he is not getting the OpenAI he used to have back. It’s either Sam + Greg now or Ilya. All 3 are irreplaceable.
It's insane to me how easily Sam's side can spin the board firing him for violating the company's Charter and then not backtracking at all as "Within 24 hours the board has come crawling back, I- er Sam Altman might deign to return if they grovel hard enough and I'm given complete control."

This is really, really clearly incestuous tech media stuff as part of a pressure campaign. Sam is the darlin of tech media and he's clearly instigated this reporting because they're reporting his thoughts and not the Board's in an article that purports to know what the Board is thinking, the investors who aren't happy (the point of a non-profit is that they are allowed to make investors unhappy in pursuit of the greater mission!) have an obvious incentive to join him in this pressure campaign, and then all he needs for "journalism" is one senior employee who's willing to leave for Sam to instead say to the Verge that the Board is reconsidering. Boom, massive pressure campaign and perception of the Board flip flopping without them doing any such thing. If they had done any such thing and there was proof of that, the Verge could have quoted the thoughts of anyone on the Board, stated it had reviewed communications and verified they were genuine, etc.
Then it sounds like shadowbanning can (in some cases) be more a mental condition than some kind of a cenzorship.

Otherwise, there's a question: why could user publish a site that they think is shadowbanning them?
The wierd thing is that while Vancouver specials aren't small they are not huge either. I find it hard to picture how small the average Vancouver home would be if people had to live on half the area that most houses had.
If the board brings him back. They are done including the chief scientist. Can't stage a coup and just to bring the person back the next week
Maybe

Then again, maybe he has been making life less than desirable for the rank and file. Perhaps, even, they felt he was a bad fit for the company too. I don’t know, because I don’t work there.

If this is the case, good time to start hiring away engineers to another firm.

He may be the face, but faces change. Sam Altman isn’t t the only person capable of taking the reins. There is nothing about him that is more “magic” in this case, because the tech is always been their selling point. I think any competent CEO could sell the hell out of OpenAI right now

In as so far as bringing him back: I don’t know the validity nor veracity of those discussions. That news hit a little fast to me to have been fully fleshed out. Not saying it’s untrue, but “some of the board” talking isn’t the same thing as all of the board, either
Impossible to know what is going on, really. The Forbes article makes it sound like there is significant investment pressure in trying to get Altman back on board, and they likely have access to the board. It could very well be that the board themselves have no desire to bring Altman back, but these conversations ended up being the origin for the story that they did.

It's also possible that the structure of the non-profit/for-profit/operating agreement/etc. just isn't strong enough to achieve the intent and the investors have the strangehold in reality.

If I was invested in the mission statement of OpenAI I don't think I would view the reinstatement of Altman as a good thing, though. Thankfully my interest in all of this is purely entertainment.
This is a great point.

At a micro level, this helps articulate why rewriting/refactoring a feature just after writing the first version of it is so quick, relatively. And why it is often easier to write better code in a second pass. The first time you had to build the theory AND the code at the same time. In subsequent passes, you have the benefit of the theory from the start.

I think this concept is self-evident to most experienced engineers, but I have not heard quite as succinct an articulation of it before.
Read the second link on my post. A menu bar is one or two word that are easy to read. The recommendation on those posts are for long texts that need sustain attention to be read. The second article shows data of readers reading speed based on font size.
Stability VP quits in protest over 'fair use' excuse
Altman will come back.

He'll sack the board.

He'll sack Ilya.

He'll change the structure of the organisation completely.
No, it's not free. Fonts are incredibly labor intensive and require both artistic and technical skill. $75 for a family of well designed fonts pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for paid fonts. Check out the pricing for a single variant of something like Helvetica or FF Meta some time. A single family may very well be someone's entire life's work. Same reason that you get paid to bang on a keyboard while open source exists.

That said I've not bought Berkeley Mono, and probably won't (mostly because the style isn't quite to my current taste). I've bought fonts in the past, typically drawing the piracy line when I make money from a font (e.g. letterhead, business cards). Over the past two decades the list includes: Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic (great at small sizes), FF Meta and FF Zwo (for copy), and FF Mister K (uses ligatures to create a more organic looking handwriting font).

Much like with other software there are great free alternatives that pop up every once in a while on HN when the topic of coding fonts comes up. Fira Code (by Erik Spiekermann of FF fame), Plex (IBM), Source Code (Adobe), Cascadia (Microsoft), and JetBrains Mono (duh). Notice that they're all backed by large orgs — again, fonts are a ton of work. Contrast that with something like B612 (Airbus) which is cool but also basically abandonware and lacks the fit and finish of the previous fonts.

If you want the retro vibe and are okay pirating abandonware, the guy at int10h.org maintains a collection of fonts scraped from vintage ROMs[0]. But again these lack the polish you may be used to as they're way out of their element on modern systems.

Me? I'm currently using M+ Code 60[1] (Coji Morishita backed by Google) as a daily driver[2]. I'm enamored with its slightly quirky style (just enough to keep me interested) and its legibility as a console font.

0: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/

1: https://mplusfonts.github.io

2: https://i.imgur.com/AG2IbT0.png
Yeah, it's a very silly article with wrong mathematical reasoning. Hinton is quite obviously talking about a much more information-theoretic approach to the process, but he's phrasing it in people-friendly terms.

What's a little more concerning to me is that people are reading and upvoting it. I think, because I have hopes and aspirations about working on some very hard problems and communicating them to the public at some point. And if this is the level of 'ooh, squirrel'! that we're going at, that the work that I make might get overshadowed by something really silly.

Perhaps an odd insecurity, but there it is, I think.
Well, I disagree with you on embodiment, but on the thousands? Right that’s another part: evolution. Spread your bets.

But I disagree about a human or animal body not being required.

I think we have to take the world as we see it and appreciate our own limitations in that what we think of intelligence fundamentally arises out of our evolution in this world; our embodiment and response to this world.

so I think we do need to give it a body and let it explore this world.

I don’t think the virtual bodies thing is gonna work. I don’t think letting it explore the Internet is gonna work. you have to give it a body multiple senses let it survive. That’s how you get AGI, not not virtual embodiment. Which I never meant, but thought it was obvious given the term embody minute self strongly, suggesting something that’s not virtual! Hahaha ! :)
translation: I'm ok with deadweight loss to society because it benefits me and screws people I don't know who are getting paid a number (and who are willing to pay a number) that I perceive to be a lot of money anyway.

If you think it's a good thing that government can swoop in and take something they didn't earn via bidding for. You need to get your head on straight because there are many things you or your friends might possess that may look mighty fine to some government guy in the future and you want strong property rights to protect you.

Also, it's intensely weird to say a government should be able to export ban and right of first refusal anything as foolish as art. What's next? Export ban and right of first refusal on all tinder dates about to be consumated? It's utterly bizarre. If you want something and it's for sale, pay for it at the auction where you have the chance to get it, just like everyone else.
It’s not a hypothetical. You are saying that the government should outlaw content producers from distributing their own content.

How do you define content producers and are you going to force them to allow anyone to distribute their content?

Are you going to apply the same standards to all content producers?

There was never a time that Netflix had the majority of the top content - especially movies

Sure you can watch all of the content you want just like you always did - you pay for it.
Riddle me this: what is an AI research lab without access to exascale compute? Who’s cloud infrastructure do they depend on fully right now?
'at this point in time'.

This is now a mature market and mature markets are governed by economics unless you manage to make a massive step forwards. So if that x% improvement comes with an increase in total cost over installed life > x% it's a non-starter.
Don't you think it's weird that maybe the most important company in 2023 has people with no documented experience on its board?
Occult and occlude are very similar, but they actually do not share a similar etymological origin. Occlude could definitely be used here, but the more appropriate astronomical word would be occult.

The etymological sense of occlude is that of closing off/blocking, while occult is covering/hiding.
Whoever had to do with ChatGPT most is the reason OpenAI is where it is today.
You mean besides the business experience of already having gone down this path so he can speedrun while everyone else is still trying to find the path?

Easy; his contacts list. He has everyone anyone could want in his contacts list politician tech executives financial backers and a preexisting positive relationship with most of them. When alternative would be entrepreneurs are needing to make a deal with a major company like Microsoft or Google it will be upper middlemanagement and lawyers, a committees or three will weigh in on it present it to their bosses etc. With Sam he calls up the CEO and has few drinks at the golf course and they decide to work with him and they make it happen.
I don't know about OpenAI, but I suspect that Altman was the one making the big deals, personally. Companies (like Microsoft) are not going to like the idea that:

a) A company they've partnered so heavily with is changing things up

b) That the change-up is to their point-person

It's not about whether another CEO could steer the ship, it's about the previous context and relationships that, regardless of skill, are going to have to be rebuilt carefully when you just rip out the point-person.

> Then again, maybe he has been making life less than desirable for the rank and file. Perhaps, even, they felt he was a bad fit for the company too. I don’t know, because I don’t work there.

People have already resigned over this...
Pocketful of Dough – Tips on Tipping (2000)
This is not a court of law. No one is going to jail without a trial. If he can prove it is false, he can sue her for defamation. If he can’t, she has the freedom of speech to make her case.
I would hope that there were a better 'we don't need evidence because it is obvious they are harmful' argument than 'things are complex and we don't know yet'.
History is littered with the mistakes of deluded people with more power than ought to have been granted to them.
Look at where the sats dwell, mostly over the North Pole. Now think about the great circle routes between the USA and the USSR.
Wow, thanks for the hint. I presume you mean this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon,_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%26....
That does make it very likely that I was wrong and that is indeed exactly what they typed!
OTOH everyone right now is fighting for Nvidia's GPUs, and I bet (ex)OpenAI people know exactly what hardware they'd like that would be best suited for their task.
>> And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement

> ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement

At least she wasn't a vegetarian. Hitler was a vegetarian. That would have been the final nail in the coffin
Based on the firing? Because that’s all I think we (the public) have any insight into.

I’m saying there is a reason this happened and 2/3 the board agreed. It needs to play out further for us to see if there is a problem here or not, honestly.

I find it hard to believe you can effectively muster a mandate worth of votes based on opinion alone
It’s of Shakespearean proportions. I’m learning along with the rest how these tunings unfold!
I'm pretty sure the people that kicked out altman don't consider this success and don't want the money
If seems like the right thing to do is to look up "occult" in the dictionary instead of leaving a two word comment like "Occlude, LOL."
“italian” and “italy” are about 1100 years younger than the painting.
Provided a good enough reason there were many ways in which the board could have fired Altman without making waves. They utterly f'd that up, and even if their original reasons were good the way they went about it made those reasons moot. They may have to re-instate Altman for optical reasons alone at this point and it would still be a net win. What an incredible shit show.
Infocom-zcode-terps: Historical source code for Infocom's Z-machine interpreters
Logging messages in the clear to Sentry, Firebase is embarrassing for an app that purports to make messages unreadable to Nothing.
Yes, its open and shut that offering a compensation package doesn't mean that, starting with #1.

And you can't make that case with the later decision by the nonprofit board (even if one assumes that an entity that has complete control of a party can even count as a "third party" for tortious interference rather than just being a source of breach of contract if it actually induces a breach), because the OpenAI Global LLC operating agreement expressly sets this out as normal, so there is no reasonable expected benefit of the relationship that is being interfered with.

If OpenAI Global LLC offered its employees the PIU/PPU as compensation but did not disclose (or, a fortiori, actively concealed), you could make a case for fairly simple fraud. But tortious interference is just not a tort that works here.
You: "The goal of the company is to not make money"

Me: "Good luck with that terrible strategy"

Not a straw man.
I so wish I could be a fly on the wall in all this. There's got to be some very interesting moves and countermoves. This isn't over yet.
Your link talks (theoretically, not practically) about 100% RE by 2060! Do you understand what “currently” means?

You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China).

So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.
But they (AI folks) keep talking about "safety" all the time. What is their definition of safety then? What are they trying to achieve?
Uhh... sure; whatever.
And are you an LLM or are you the only human that feels this way?

You've proven my point by replying to my comment.
Or you use MaybeUninint, which I think is a great example of how unsafe Rust exposes to potential memory unsafety but grants you control when you need it.
This is called employee ownership. And yes, it would be great.
Like mass soulless firings don’t happen?

Why aren’t we holding CEOs to the fire when they layoff thousands of people in what is effectively an email? Thats somehow okay but a CEO being ousted suddenly and it’s all hands on deck bad optics?

The board had a mandate level of votes for the replacement of Sam (2/3 of the board voted yes). Thats conviction.
Not all, or even arguably most AI researchers subscribe to The Big Scary Idea.
None of the news that has come out has indicated that was the case
NASA doesn't have 4-5% of the federal budget but is about to do it again on the Artemis missions with one hand tied behind their backs on Congressionally-mandated designs.
Very nice skepticism.
Show HN: typerassistant – turn any Typer app in to a function-calling assistant
I'm working on an automation assistant for a customized development workflow, and I built this quick and easy wrapper to instantly build in a function-calling assistant to any Typer CLI.

For now, it injects an 'ask' command in to your typer CLI, which you can use to perform standard model queries via the OpenAI assistant API. These queries have the full typer CLI exported to them as functions. There are examples provided of how the assistant can chain these calls together for you, and do some very cool things.

Additionally, the underlying assistant objects are exposed. This part needs a lot of work still to get it to where I think it needs to be - there is a roadmap in the README.md. I'm paying particular attention to the lifecycle of assistants and doing things like intelligent incremental updates when the underlying assistant definition changes, but that's all a bit rough right now. Again, details in the README.md.

This is my first PyPI published package and I would very much appreciate any helpful tips on how to make this project a success; I think it can do a lot more than it's currently doing, and I would like to commit to growing it.

(Also: I am looking for full-time remote work in backend, tooling, or devops!)
Global Shutdown on Sunday Due to Cricket World Cup
Is this why I get a never ending loop of captcha prompts? I complete them, they keep coming, never proceeds to the article. I just switched to CloudFlare's DNS records about two weeks ago. I guess I'll flip back and try again!
Sam is not just the darling of tech media.
He literally

1. Met with every major head of state except for Xi and Putin. He is the face of AI, not just for OpenAI, but for the entire world. The entire AI industry would hate for this to happen.
2. Lead a company from 2 billion valuation to nearly 80 billion in a year.

There is no precedent in startup history to get rid of a CEO at this stage.
> "a company like OpenAI"

Maybe the problem is the meteoric rise of OpenAI--at the time this board was instituted, the company was much smaller, and wouldn't have been able to draw a more illustrious set of board members?
I think when it started it was not the most important tech company but just some open research effort.
If reinstating Altman causes ilya sutskever to quit then Open AI will probably be worse off.
I read this as, and both Conway and Y Combinator are famous for their defense of founders.

He might be emotional and defend his friends that’s not in challenge, he likes the guys— and he might be more cynical when it comes to firing 10,000 engineers —that’s less what I’ve heard about him personally, but maybe— however, in this case, he’s explicitly defending not an employee victim of the almighty board, but the people who created the entity, who later entrusted the board with some responsibility to keep the entity faithful to its mission.

Some might think Sam deserves that title less than Greg… not sure I can vouch for either. But Conway is trying to say that all entities (and their governance) owe their founders a debt of consideration, of care. That’s filial piety more than anything contractual. That isn’t the same as the social obligation that an employer might have.

The cult for founders, “0 to 1” and all that might be overblown in San Francisco, but there’s still a legitimate sense that the people who started all this should only be kicked out if they did something outrageous. Take Woz: he’s not working, or useful, or even that respectful of Apple’s decisions nowadays. But he still gets “an employee discount” (which is admittedly more a gimmick). That deference is closer to what Conway seems to flag than the (indeed) fairly violent treatment of a lot of employees during the staff reduction of the last year.
> I would argue that you have a very, oddly restricted definition of the word, understand, and one that isn't particularly useful.

Is it just me or does this read like “here is my assumption about what you said, and now here is my passive aggressive judgement about that assumption”? If you’re not certain about what they mean by the word “understand”, I bet you could ask and they might explain it. Just a suggestion.
Toward a real-time decoding of images from brain activity
The shows writers had quite a few advisors with deep ties to Silicon Valley. Former twitter ceo dick Costello comes to mind.
The reason something like GPT didn't come out of e.g. Google is that they had/have stuff similar but were very reticent about making it public -- because of the ethical aspects as well as the sheer resource cost of hosting it to the public -- and also I suspect have naturally internal conflicts about whether it's the right direction to take, etc.

And so something like OpenAI came along where Ilya S etc. got bags of money to go take that approach and scale the crap out of it, and, yeah, they got results. Because they didn't have to be careful, or deal with competing interests.

That's all fine, but it's also no surprise when it all blows up, is it?
Whenever I see someone like this on HN – someone whose motivation is to build a large company and make a lot of money, someone who is an "idea guy," someone for whom programming is merely a means to an end – I'm glad I'm not like this. I'm grateful that programming itself is genuinely fun to me, that I don't mind whether what I'm coding is useful or ends up generating money. I'm glad I program because I enjoy it, not because I convinced myself to do it, hoping it would advance my career.

At the same time, it saddens me that the thing I love so much becomes a source of frustration for many others.
Shall we jump on a dyte? Sure,
can you swim though?
I hope you wake up with a brighter outlook of the world tomorrow.
This babysitting of the world gets annoying, tbh. As if everyone to lose their mind and start acting illegal only because chatbot said so. There’s something fundamentally wrong with humanity (which isn’t surprising given the history of our species), if that is unsafe. AI is just a source of information, it doesn’t cancel upbringing and education for human values and methods of dealing with information.
I think Prigozhin's coup went slightly worse for Prigozhin.
> Bad take. Not "everyone" feels that what they did was wrong.

But everyone important does so who cares about the rest?