skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Popcap is just one of the ways to design an RTS, there are others.

Zero-K solves the problems solved by popcap in other ways. Income tracks map control, and controlling more of the map is hard, so players that are ahead don't have the freedom to sit back and build up an overwhelming army. Armies are fighting or jockeying for position throughout the game and army size and composition keeps escalating. Defenders advantage shifts to attackers advantage as things escalate, so people can't just sit in their base. The overall effect is that, while there is a pop cap at the technical level, it is 10x higher than the unit counts that even the largest battles tend to equilibrate to.

Talking about the lack of popcap is a bit backwards in a way. There are just so many subtle things that mean the question of popcap never has to come up. Maps are pretty open, units don't fire through each other, AoE exists... the list goes on. A better question might be why games with a popcap couldn't be designed away from the failure mode of people sitting in their base making larger and larger armies. Having to put a hard cap on army sizes, that people regularly reach, is sort of a drastic measure.

On supply, I'd say what you said about supply is pretty important. But the aspect of it you bring up isn't limited to popcap. Eg C&C games have power plants that act as construction supply. Rebuilding your base is easier the second time around, as long as you keep your power plants. There is something similar in Zero-K with energy. Metal comes from points around the map while energy can be built in your base, and both resources are used for construction. When you take more metal spots you also need more energy, and the energy is nowhere near as vulnerable. That is the main supply-like comeback mechanic, which works since part of your economy is always vulnerable. Reclaiming wrecks for metal is another comeback mechanic.
This looks like a short term compromise to defend MSFT before the market opens. A number of members will follow Sam and Greg, but I doubt if it will be the majority given it's yet another big tech rather than a brand new startup. And what would be their roles? Yet another VP/SVP? Those folks are not really AI guys and don't fit very nicely into all the bureaucracy rampant in big techs. Satya will of course try to give them as much room as possible, but it will be considerably smaller and slower thanks to all those corporate politics and external regulations.
You are not engaging in a reasonable discussion.
Curious to see how long Sam lasts as an employee.
Why would you be constantly polling a feed? You only poll once or twice a day when you want to read the news.
The CEO's job is to enrich the shareholders and by that metric he has done a pretty good job. More qualitatively, being able to change Microsoft's trajectory from boring enterprise tech company to a tech leader with strategic deals (OpenAI, Github) is very impressive.
To what extent can they lead research that builds off of existing OpenAI models?
It's mind boggling that a corporation of that size would care about stock fluctuations on the order of minutes, hours, and days.
This plays perfectly into the narrative that Sam wanted to take this godlike tech that Ilya created and commercialize it.

Sam chose greed over safety.
The whole situation likely arose due to Microsoft attempting to cross the boundaries set by OpenAI.
Technical Writing Essentials
What's the lead time on a gross of H100s these days?
>I think Sam's goal is to create AGI

Supposedly his goal was the same as OpenAi --> AGI that benefits society instead of shareholders.

Seems like a hard mission to accomplish within Microsoft.
> The only value Sam brought to OpenAI was connections and being able to bring funding

OpenAI was last week a $100b company.

You need to do more than just "build an AI model" for that to happen.
November 17th OpenAI blog post: "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

The fact that they agreed to join as MS employees kinda proves that money was a big motivator.
The flip side perspective is people will love focusing on doing it right, without being rushed to market for moat building and max profit.
I'm working on a personalizable RSS feed for HN that classifies all posts based on your preferences.

Would you use it? https://kadoa.com/hacksnack
You can convert newsletters to RSS:

https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
In five years, he'll be the CEO. [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
> MS is betting the company on AI.

This doesn't mean anything when they have multiple non-AI revenue streams generating billions.
Yep, people causing the same behavior with their prejudices that they are prejudiced against. It would be funny, if it wasn't a problem.

Even being a skilled high earning immigrant, the ones that are sought after, you will get some weird interactions. It's weird being called "one of the good ones" by a guy at a bar who was ranting about immigrants, but even interacting with nice intending people can get uncomfortable, like a native waiter telling me that once I learn the language, I will be able to get a nice paying job.

So far, things are still fine for me, I'm isolated about most of the problems, and I still find what I was looking for (a more quiet society, a less car centric infrastructure, different culture); but if the far right keeps rising, I will certainly think twice about staying. Those people will act on their prejudices, won't be able to asses if I really cause problems or not.
Quelle Surprise.
I am a huge fan of RSS (Atom) and was really hoping for a comeback... I feel like it unfairly died out because of Google Reader's sudden demise and was hoping some new equally popular client to show up and take over. I even spent some time creating one.

But for the past year or so I have been falling down the Nostr rabbit hole. Nostr is a lot like RSS, but it really is better and without getting much more complicated! You can write a Nostr client that simply does what a RSS reader would do (fetch status updates) in a couple of lines without external libraries. And the Nostr ecosystem has been growing so much over the past months, it is getting hard to keep up! It seems to be really getting the momentum I was hoping RSS to regain.

PS: For those that are curious about Nostr and don't know where to start, have a look at the NIPS [1] and of course at the awesome-nostr [2] list on GitHub!

[1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips
[2]: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
This might be good for society. If there are multiple entities that develop such AI technology, there's some kind of competition and a distribution of power.

Of course I'd prefer if everyone could just train such a model on their smartphone with a public dataset and an open source software. At least in terms of compute, companies will always be ahead.
Sam is already post money rich. Lucrative isn’t in this equation
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There are engineers who care about the kinds of values that OpenAI was founded on, which have just been – arguably – reaffirmed and revalidated by this latest drama. OpenAI's commercialization was only ever a means to have sufficient compute to chase AGI… If you watch interviews of Ilya you'll see how reluctant he is on principle to yield to the need for profit incentives, but he understands it is a necessary evil to get all the GPUs. There are engineers, and increasingly, non-VC money, that have larger stakes in outcomes for humanity who I feel will back a 'purer' OpenAI.
Greenland has four timezones in use:
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/greenland
Presumably because MSFT is the most highly diversified tech company on the planet and he's overseeing multiple billion dollar businesses there without breaking a sweat.

Not to mention the only big tech that seems to have a coherent AI strategy at the moment.
Not sure what the big deal is here. The tech and engineering team is surely the most valuable asset, not the CEO.

Edit: comment retracted. People going with him!
Not all data entries in every dataset is distinct, far from it. It seems to me, that you are trying to argue that big O is not useful, because you believe that an assumption of constant time comparison cannot be done. But I disagree, once we go into the realm where we cannot assume that comparisons are constant time, we are also in the realm where IO operations dominate the runtime, and we base our big O on IO operations rather comparisons. Here the bound and big O is even more relevant.
Where does the liquidity come from? Inflation and debt burdened retail schmucks? Or institutions who won't touch an unregulated asset with a ten-foot pole?
It's only a symptom of greater problems, you can't treat these efficiently without tackling said roots.
Well hasn't the term chicagoland invented to sound like the Legoland theme park in the first place? I guess if another large city name was terminating with -ney its metropolitan area would also be called in a similar way.
Microsoft would at least like him not to do that job for a competitor.

Given they paid for a big stake in the market leader, and their stock price movements when this drama erupted, keeping these people in-house can be seen as damage control.
That is an an amazing turn of events that I did not see anyone predict. Or perhaps I did not just see it. But in retrospect, not surprising.
The article misses the point, but raises a few valid ones. "Terrorism" is often said to have no general agreed upon meaning, which is true, but there is a reason for this: It is certainly a term with a core, disparaging meaning, but the term is notoriously misused in overreaching efforts to discredit political opponents in general.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the term is a Weberian idealtypischer concept, but the core, disparaging meaning is this: deadly attacks on an innocent civilian population by a non-state entity, or in an undeclared war, with the intent to terrorize, which in turn may or may not have further political aims. The terrorist agenda is almost always supported by the idea that the civilians are guilty of the supposed crimes of the collective (state or otherwise) those civilians might belong to.

States may be accused of terrorism if they attack civilians where no war has been declared. In a declared war the situation is not so clear cut.

Chomsky raises a valid point that we tend not to label "our" terrorist actions terrorism, but he argues against the definition of terrorism which is literal (i.e. "causing terror in a civilian population") not the semantic meaning as outlined above.

The uncaring murder of civilians that "we" engage in and which he catalogues in the article is not terrorism in the semantic sense. It is another, special kind of moral depravity and should be labeled as such.
I don’t quite buy your Cyberpunk utopia where the Megacorp finally rids us of those pesky ethics qualms (or ”shackles“, as you phrased it.) Microsoft can now proceed without the guidance of a council that actually has humanities interests in mind, not only those of Microsoft shareholders. I don’t know whether all that caution will turn out to have been necessary, but I guess we’re just gleefully heading into whatever lies ahead without any concern whatsoever, and learn it the hard way.

It’s a bit tragic that Ilya and company achieved the exact opposite of what they intended apparently, by driving those they attempted to slow down into the arms of people with more money and less morals. Well.
For a quick overview, google Microsoft stock and take a look at what happened to it after he became CEO in February 2014. It had been farting along at $24-35 a share with little lasting change since 2000. As soon as he got involved it started rising stratospherically and is now at about $360.
Partnering with openAI turned out to be a brilliant idea that has helped them corner a brand new market. And poaching perhaps half their staff after an unforced error by their board is even shrewder.
Leadership - To stay top of the game, you can't just rely on brunch of engineers, but a person/team to pull everything into shape. Seeing how many employees are leaving for sama, you get the sense.
TBH, my primary concern is this will be the catalyst for another market crash by destroying the public trust in AI, which is currently benefiting from investor FOMO.

Bear in mind that the cause of an equity market crash and its trigger are two different things.

The 2000 crash in Tech was caused by market speculation in enthusiastic dot-com companies with poor management YES, but the trigger was simply the DOJ finally making Bill throw a chair (they had enough of being humiliated by him for decades as they struggled with old mainframe tech and limited staffing).

If the dot-com crash trigger had not arrived for another 12-18 months, I’m sure the whole mess could have been swept under the rug by traders during the Black Swan event and the recovery of the healthy companies would have been 5-6 months, not 5-6 years (or 20 years in MSFT’s case).
Isn't that exactly what the research director wanted? As you said, he hates the business side and just wants to do research. So he got what he asked for.
Also Wozniak is relatively known, maybe Gates/Allen works better as an analogy.
They won’t be able to accomplish their mission without external funding, though (longterm anyway). Seemingly what they did significantly compromised their ability to obtain it in the future.

So I guess they’d prefer not accomplishing their mission at all instead of only partially (and having to compromise/change parts of it)? Which is not unreasonable if you assume nobody else will ever be able to catch up with them…
I may misunderstand what “Extension to the ISO C standard” can mean, but getenv isn’t thread-safe, either.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/:

“The getenv() function need not be thread-safe”

I expect most if not all implementations are more robust.
I don’t find him charismatic at all. I find Donald Trump more charismatic and I think he is the devil in disguise.
Hiring famous well known big names of the industry (even if they're useless and will just coast for crazy money) sends a strong signal to investors and will most likely boost MSFT stock price during this ongoing AI bubble.

And once the AI bubble pops as everyone learns AGI indeed NOT 'around the corner', Microsoft will silently let him go with a golden parachute in the 8 figure ballpark.

At least that's what I learned from watching the Silicon Valley satire.
Not quite.

Local time is very important. "Tomorrow at 9:00" is a meaningful local time for everyone, but doesn't refer to the same global time. It would be wrong to attach a time zone to such data.

Past events, on the other hand, do require timezone data if they are recording human activity, which is basically everything. "Just use UTC" is data loss. You now don't know whether at event took place at midday or midnight. Two very different results for many activities.
I say this without having really looked into what their latest stance is, but did the fame and money since forming OpenAI perhaps change their initial tune?
The Morning Brew #3827
Phil Spencer is CEO of Microsoft Gaming
Was not the Xbox team kinda run like that?
I thought Sam Altman is businessman, not researcher. What does he going to do in MS? MS does not need external investments. Probably that's the end of his career.
I wouldn't be so sure. There are a whole lot of people that want absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft.
How did you that conclusion from what I said?
yeah most likely they have like 6 billion left in the bank accounts which they'll redirect to the new AI lab
Only time will tell how this will play out. When I come back to this comment years down the road, I hope we all will be in a better place.
> Isn't this just how life on Earth works tho?

Is more like how dead on Earth works

If the goal is returning the planet to their original status of lifeless floating rock for billions of years, we are doing a spectacular job in just a glimpse of time. I can imagine how puzzling this will appear in the fossil record some millions years from now.
I wouldn't put it past them. There's never in history been as large and as wilful destruction of value as what we saw this weekend. The lawsuits will be fascinating.
He was a marketing person I believe when Bill was in MSFT. To become the CEO of MSFT is a huge political and competence firewall already. Then to do the most spectacular transformation of a mega-corp is next-level. MSFT is now the leading player in AI, while before it was still fucking around with office and Windows licenses. People who are young (not saying you are), and don't remember what MSFT was before Satya, don't really get that MSFT would be like Oracle and IBM if not for Satya.
As I was saying, Satya justt confirmed it:
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
Public perception and connections.
IMF NFT but for world leaders only
> Creating safe AGI that benefits all of humanity

Benefit and available can have very different meaning when you mix in alignment/safety concerns.
I don't see how this is applies. OpenAI fired the CEO themselves. What extinguishing is Microsoft doing here?
Elon's swipe at Microsoft Teams is golden
RSS delegates that responsibility to your own, local, feed reader software, along with any sort of privacy measures you want in place. This I believe is (at the very least) quite defendable as I trust the software I run on my machine more than some random server on the internet.
Agree wholeheartedly. Human skepticism of computer systems has saved our species from nuclear extinction multiple times (Stanislav Petrov incident, 1979 NORAD training tapes incident, etc.)

The specific concern that we in DISARM:SIMC4 have is that as AI systems start to be perceived as being smarter (due to being better and better at natural language rhetoric and at generating infographics), people in command will become more likely to set aside their skepticism and just trust the computer, even if the computer is convincingly hallucinating.

The tendency of decision makers (including soldiers) to have higher trust in smarter-seeming systems is called Automation Bias.

> The dangers of automation bias and pre-delegating authority were evident during the early stages of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Two out of 11 successful interceptions involving automated US Patriot missile systems were fratricides (friendly-fire incidents).

https://thebulletin.org/2023/02/keeping-humans-in-the-loop-i...

Perhaps Stanislav Petrov would not have ignored the erroneous Soviet missile warning computer he operated, if it generated paragraphs of convincing text and several infographics as hallucinated “evidence” of the reality of the supposed inbound strike. He himself later recollected that he felt the chances of the strike being real were 50-50, an even gamble, so in this situation of moral quandary he struggled for several minutes, until, finally, he went with his gut and countermanded the system which required disobeying the Soviet military’s procedures and should have gotten him shot for treason. Even a slight increase in the persuasiveness of the computer’s rhetoric and graphics could have tipped this to 51-49 and thus caused our extinction.
As I was saying, Satya just confirmed it:
https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
At the end of the day, it is MSFT that emerged as a winner.
Improving the efficiency of your regular expressions
I'd have expected a lot of OpenAI employees to join whatever initiative Sam and gdb started next, but the profile of someone who joined OpenAI this past year and a Microsoft employee are...quite different.
Presumably yes, depending on what's in the legal documents. I am guessing that Microsoft will transition slowly, in order to provide continuity to the Azure customers. But OpenAI will not "thrive" from this deal anymore. Partnerships tend to only work when both sides are interested, regardless of the agreements. If OpenAI needs several more $billion to train GPT-5, this will get sabotaged.

The scaling party is basically over. Or rather, it has moved to Redmond.
> Both of them will eventually find it moot to advance tech so a few folks get richer.

What does the word "moot" mean in this context?
a) Meta is not competing with OpenAI nor has any plans to.

b) AI is only being commoditised at the low-end for models that can be trained by ordinary people. At the high-end there is only companies like Microsoft, Google etc that can compete. And Sam was brilliant enough to lock in Microsoft early.

c) What was stopping 3rd parties from building a ChatGPT was the out of reach training costs not access to APIs which didn't even exist at the time.
I agree. 10B is peanuts for MSFT but its Satya's miscalculation. He didn't anticipate that and the board wouldn't be too happy about it.
Openai board and similar are interested in value signaling, not any progress of any sorts.
Every SV CEO has a "Sam Altman saved my butt during crucial incident X" story
The Domesday Project came from the early years of mass computing, when we (collectively) hadn’t yet learned some important lessons about data management. I think experiences like this project are one of the reasons we are better at digital preservation now. The main risks to data durability are no longer technical, but social - neglect, for example.
Yeah I'm surprised about Sam joining MS based on he usually says. But on the other hand, that's a pretty neat move - you fire me - now I own you (simplification, maybe).
Case in point: Google and Bard.
Depends on what proportion of engineers/scientists follow the CEO to Microsoft.

Also with a lack of direction (and by extension funding) even the best engineering team won’t be able to achieve that much (they might be able to hire better management, of course I have no clue)
that is what i thought, when Sam was fired, i think he is kind of people can be replaced by AI generated something ( ai-ceo ), not that complicate compare to engineer or scientist. and another replaceable one is Satya Nadella. and the ai-ceo maybe much less evil than them, since they are the one convert ( i am not sure if they committed fraud ) the non-profit, open source entity to for-profit and closed source entity.
Microsoft’s share price swings about more than that on a daily basis
Exposing global mutable access to something and providing no thread safe version counts as broken in my book. Your book may differ.

A good API would probably only allow constant access. If mutation is for some reason deemed necessary then it should be through a separate set API and the return results of get should be guaranteed safe.
In this article, we take a practical look at WebAssembly (WASM), a rising technology that serves as a lightweight alternative to traditional containers. Leading cloud computing tools like Kubernetes and Docker are actively working on integrating WebAssembly into their platforms.
Or ... cut the middleman: Sam Altman and Greg Brockman joining MS to start a new AI unit - https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726516824597258569
"The great silence"
At the least, probably a good PR move for MS. It's a good move to counter whatever weight would be going against the MS stock price given they made a huge investment into OpenAI.
Have fun defining and proving AGI lol
Then put that in a docker container for people like me who are too impatient to read 10 step documents.
If you use it to read news, sure. But, as the post suggests, it can be used for much more!