skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to the drama surrounding an unexpected firing decision made by a less-than-typical 501(c)3 board of directors, there is a large vacuum of information about what exactly happened.

On one side, there are proponents of an argument that Sam hid evidence of the achievement of AGI from the board, or that he pushed for acceleration of development in a way that scared the board.

On the other side, there are proponents of an argument that the board wasn't happy with OpenAI Dev Day pushing commercialization directly within OpenAI (e.g. the marketplace) against the wishes of the board and OpenAI's charter.

Until Sam, OpenAI, or others comment further, this is the perfect playground for speculation and court intrigue about what is arguably the most prominent technology company of the 2020's (thus far).
https://archive.is/k459Q
The readout showed 20k km/hour towards the end. It was definitely near orbital speed.

You might be looking at the first stage’s data.

Edit: 24,124 km/hr when telemetry stopped on the stream; 15k mph.
>I guess time will tell whether more claims by this user hold up.

Thats the point, it doesnt matter if they do or dont.

If you read through their post history, they have a comment or sentence for almost every possible reason:

Difference in vision

forcing development to fast

Didn't listen to safety concerns

Lying about finances

Making deals without the board

Hiding financial matters.

It is like someone is rattling off the top 10 guesses for the reason from HN or predication markets.

Now if they said something like Ilya Sutskever called Sam at 1215 on hangouts to tell him, That would be a be pretty solid proof.
Hard to explain why Europeans, for example Volkswagen or BMW, are not treated similarly, then.
What's always incredible to me is how much "outside activity" is tolerated of tech CEOs. I get it, they are at the top, they make the rules, but wow.

Even a lowly new grad engineer has to sign a lot of stuff when they take a job that forces essentially exclusivity to your work there. I cannot dabble in outside businesses within the same industry or adjacent industries.

CEOs argue that their job is tough and many hours and life consuming and that's why they get the pay, and yet there is a whole genre of tech CEOs who try to CEO 5 companies at a time..
> at least as significant as — if not more than — agriculture

Are there really people out there who believe that? I mean, agriculture was a BIG BIG BIG deal for humanity, it is not unreasonable to thing that this will have been out biggest deal.
> When I was an employee of the government, ethics laws limited my ability to leave and sell my services to the government in various ways. There are similar scenarios in other industries.

I think this is more about corruption control than non-compete.
> And he thinks some humans will one day choose to merge with machines. A lot of what Sutskever says is wild. But not nearly as wild as it would have sounded just one or two years ago.

Ok it is an intro.. but they say this as if he would be the first to say that, but that has been SciFi lore since computers were invented? And also as if this would not be happening today already at a certain limited scale.. so no doubts to this will happen at some point, if you count today's approaches not in.
HN has a default font-size of 10pt

(which equates to 13px/0.8em).
MS engineered this so they could complete the takeover
A search "annie altman site:ycombinator.com" gets quite a few pages which are flagged, so flagged by users. Those are then hidden unless you have "showdead" enabled in your settings.
Well, the page briefly explains each effect. Many are indeed just a couple prerendered frames page flipped in a loop.
They are not aiming at outperforming Van Gogh.
Also, Elastic on AWS looks a lot like a loss-leader.
Similar reaction, I was hoping to see the heat shield tested on re-entry but a successful hot staging was a huge milestone. Also they didn't absolutely devastate the launch pad thanks to the launch deluge system!
Isn't reentry supposed to be the hard part? How was this a success?
It has been trained on fictions where characters are more likely to survive against all odds, and likely to die when you don't expect it.
Vision Controlled Jetting for Robots (3D printed hand)
Tortoise and hare, perhaps.

Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit.

Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.
New research suggests plants could absorb more CO2 than previously expected
I'm asking a question without an answer
It'll be interesting to see how the BYD Seagull and (even smaller) Chery QQ do in the next few years, then.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Seagull

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery_QQ_Ice_Cream
Because everybody is afraid they will cut access to the API now (saying "we need to focus on research rather than business"). And since they are the only ones controlling the access to the API, (1) people depending on it are screwed, (2) the competition like Claude will have a big boost.
Because there are no hot people in our industry with interesting scandals.
I don't know why it doesn't work well in FF and I haven't tried troubleshooting it but I am not the only one who uses Chrome on Linux only for Netflix.
"I'm going to sue anyone who's critical of me." isn't the flex to bring advertisers back that Elon thinks it is...
Because he basically got fired by Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner who are inexperienced outsiders. Either Adam or Ilya initiated the move, but those two give them the votes needed to fire Sam. Not to mention those board members have no stake, so whatever incentives they were given to do this are likely not aligned with the OpenAI business.
Yes. Depending on improvement trajectory and implementation velocity, this could replace a material amount of global aggregate knowledge work.

EDIT: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-18/ai-can-do... | https://archive.today/b37TG ("Bloomberg: AI Can Do Your Admin Tasks, Britain Tells Its Public Workers")

> Governments around the world are increasingly turning to AI to help streamline operations and increase productivity in public services as they face higher costs and aging populations.

> In the UK, Hunt said that Al is already helping doctors and nurses treat stroke victims, and build high-quality lesson plans for teachers.

> Further use of the technology would cut teachers’ workloads by as many as five hours each week over three years, while new technologies could save the country’s police force around 750,000 hours every week he said.
The one thing Altman did wrong imo is seemingly tried to become the "technical face" of the company. He was trying to be somewhat like Musk, but he is clearly not that at OpenAI. For example, why was he at Cambridge talking to academics by himself? He should have used this as an opportunity to put some of the leading researchers in the spotlight.
This is really cool.

If I magically had my way. I’d allow twice as long responses and the ability to turn all the (absolutely charming and silly) 3D off.
The original design of X had clients send drawing commands to the X server, basically treating the server as a remote Cairo/Skia-like 2D rasterizer, and subwindows were a cheap way to avoid pixel-level damage calculations. This was obviated in the common case by the Xdamage extension. Later use of windows as a rendering surface for shared client/server buffers was added with Xshm, then for device video buffers with Xv.

GTK3 got rid of windowed widgets because Keith Packard introduced the Xrender extension, which basically added 2D compositing to X, which was the last remaining use for subwindows for every widget.
If that were true, high-profile employees probably wouldn’t be leaving OpenAI. Unless they are confident to be able to easily replicate it elsewhere.
> 5. It has deep implications for the trajectory of a technology that many see as heralding a revolution at least as significant as — if not more than — agriculture or industry, with truly existential implications for humanity.

Yes, this is likely to be one of the most important events in human history. We are living through a special period of evolution on Earth.
> The only thing utopian ideologies are good for is finding 'justifications' for murder.

This seems more like your personal definition of "utopian ideology" than an actual observation of the world we live in.
To be fair, if Sam Altman is a prophet of the techbro cult, Jobs was the messiah.
i'm just exactly at that "moment in life" where it's either 'make' money (i.e. collect it from others using trade) or recieve welfare (ask for donations, beg on the streets, call parents...)
It’s of course hard to directly compare, in large part because the AI revolution wouldn’t be possible without the agricultural revolution. But yeah, a lot of people think AI is a BIG BIG BIG BIG (note: I used one more “BIG” than you) deal for humanity.
> 3. It occurred during market hours and blindsided their investors and partners.

(Possibly dumb) question: OpenAI isn't publicly traded right? Do market hours really matter for this sort of thing for private companies?
I think there is would be another great way to take advantage of AI here, following inspiration from the Jackbox games. In the Jackbox game I played the most, there were intermediate games where there was a chance that you would lose your finger, leaving you unable to pick some of the choices in following questions. I think in a similar vein it would be cool that you can catch negative traits over multiple prompts that interact with what you were trying to answer.
I survived by pointing out that I’m not human and breathing is an optional characteristic I use to blend in.

In a way this is a “playground of ten year olds one-up each other” simulator.
Yes China has the brutal dictator and America is a liberal Democratic free land for all.

Maybe American propaganda isn’t always correct? Have you seen the coverage given to events in the Middle East in American media? The same BS Babylon Bee believes to be true?
What does this mean for the crewed mission to Mars next year?
I think that may hold true if we put AI as one part of the greater Computer Revolution.
Some great advice from Ben Kuhn on how & why of writing:

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing

I also just published some structural tips for writing quickly at high quality:

[2] https://taylor.town/pseudoprose

Make sure to create a low-friction writing environment for yourself! Whether it's a notebook or text-editor, you should be able to get your idea onto paper within 90 seconds of having it.
Individual false claims of party affinity aside, which exist within both parties (assuming a two party system):

The more articulate way to put your sentiment is that, in the end, partisan politics is about percieved correct action in the service of self-interest. On both sides.

And that someone who votes for a candidate not of their party is irrationally voting against their self interest in an act of pathological empathy.

At which point I'd offer that observers of this behavior are more likely to be wrong in their conclusions of the voter's motivation than the voter is to be acting irrationally.

It's more likely that these anomolous voters perccieve their group's self interest to be better served, in this particular hypothetical election, by the opposing candidate. Possibly given an epiphany of strategy that others of their party don't have. For example, better IQ tends to lead to divergent perspectives rooted in more complete cognitive modeling of reality (except when it doesn't).

This type of cross-isle migration may become more frequent as parties evolve in their positions.
The screen time was self reported and the cohort was 9 to 12 year olds. I'm sure researchers are a capable bunch but to my naive mind that seems like a minefield.
Just want to add another comment in here that there is no manual termination, they are using a fully automatic flight termination system.
It seems to me that in the grand scheme of things, this firing will be a side note. The people with the knowledge continue to exist, and the cat is out now. Everybody knows about the huge potential that's ripe for pickings in this field. I really doubt that this huge structural pressure will be flattened by a CEO losing his job.
Was wondering where he'd fall upward to, then I remembered how much groundwork he'd laid for AI being so dangerous everyone else should just stop researching it and if they didn't, someone in the government needed to step in and decide for them...
> When does controversial corporate stuff not result in some kind of legal action?

Truth. And further leverage depending on how much of the $10B in cash or Azure equivalents MSFT has already delivered.
Notably founded by ex-SpaceX and ex-Blue Origin employees.
I think people know. It reads so bad it obviously isn’t real to any one who didn’t know beforehand.
I have no idea why it’s such a big deal. People should come to terms with the fact that no one on Earth is irreplaceable.
The OpenAI press release seemed to indicate explicitly that the 3 independent board members have the reins, not Ilya.

> The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.
This is completely wrong. Xrender is completely orthogonal to having windows or not. Heck, Xrender takes a _window_ as target -- Xrender is just an extension to allow more complicated drawing commands to be sent to the server (like alpha composition). You make your toolkit's programmer's life more complicated, not less, by having windowless widgets (at the very minimum you now have to complicate your rendering & event handling code with offsets and clip regions and the like).

The excuse that was used when introducing windowless widgets is to reduce tearing/noise during resizing, as Gtk+ had trouble synchronizing the resizing of all the windows at the same time.
> Lawyers for Microsoft and other investors will be knocking on the boards' door Monday morning and some of these board members who have never had a real job in their lives will get steamrolled.

Just because MS sues, doesn’t mean they will win. If their contract with OpenAI say they don’t have control over the for-profit part of OpenAI (and they definitely have no control over non-profit part) then they don’t. The courts will rule against them and it will be just a waste of everyone’s time.
Scarcity depends on the amount of openly published writing. You can publish only parts of your work or publish it to limited audience.
Wow, still, while the booster was lost that much success must have given them so much more data.
Worthy of note the Calibre-Web[0] project, which builds atop Calibre library to provide powerful web interface. The project and its maintainer deserve some love and support.

[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
Microsoft is publicly traded, and owns 49% of the for-profit OpenAI Global (the company that makes money with ChatGPT etc.).
OpenAI is literally world changing but with obvious dangers. This seems like a first for big tech, I mean firing a CEO for ethics. (And while lying is the official reason, I think it's more about pointing out the dangers while squeezing ChatGPT's capabilities to their full extent for the better and the worse.) That's my understanding anyway.
Making 5-10x because they are forced into arrangements that deprive them of 10-15x.

If a waitress shouldn't be sued, why should a dev or a PM? We should all be equal under the law, there shouldn't be a "oh well you make enough money" clause. If anything, freeing high-productivity workers is the bigger win for society, far outweighing the benefit from better restaurants.
Yes, but the vibes have changed dramatically. I would expect some follow on agreements and / or amendments from MSFT.
Most exchanges have switched to order gateways that are either fpga or asic based.

Also every packet you send to an exchange is trivially attributed. They just kick you off if your shenanigans cause a problem. And then they tell all the other exchanges about you.
This. Especially with NASA. The more infrequently you launch the more the expectation is that there are no failures so the more time you take to avoid failures and so it recurses into launching SLS once every year and half or taking 10 years to launch J. Webb.

I understand a lot of it is politics and government spending but it would be nice if NASA could get a case of go fever every once in awhile. So long as humans aren't involved.

I understand if there were more failures there'd be less money for big projects -but I think we should take the chance to see if that money would end up being spent on more smaller quicker projects.
That is the TL;DR…
People who are quite prone to conspiracy are also probably the type to reject cookies (in a purely correlational sense)
All of those are very hard.
I reckon an LLM with a second pass correction loop would manage it. (By that I mean that after every response it is instructed to, given the its previous response, produce a second better response, roughly analogous to a human that thinks before it speaks)

LLMs are not AIs, but they could be a core component for one.
OpenAI isn’t a business, it’s a non-profit.
I absolutely love that idea. The AI could absolutely pick a negative trait when the player survives. Maybe they gain a positive trait when they die? That way it might balance out a little.
The largest rocket ever built just got to space for the first time. Even without re-entry this is a milestone.

They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again. It’s not like SLS where everything is expected to work perfectly.
The engines on the first stage did well in this test. During the first test they were malfunctioning like crazy.
The most irrational thing, cost wise, is to replace a working car that you've paid off.
It means I’m confident and signed up.
It's definitely a Silicon Valley thing at least to overvalue individuals and downplay good teams. Keep in mind, there are a lot of young people in this site. It's pretty fun, you get boom-bust cycles like what happened with Musk and plenty of grifters trying to take advantage of this mindset.
Apollo was also dual use military technology to accelerate the development
Could you explain and or link to any sources? Thanks
The burden of post-acute Covid-19 symptoms in a multinational cohort analysis
some more of the effects (or better attempts at them) should be possible. The tunnel, the bouncing dots, the bounce effect with the polar bear image. A lot got thrown together at the extreme last minute to hit the Demosplash deadline.
Not disagreeing or agreeing, what evidence or proof do you have?
Garden leave means you get your low base salary but not any bonus, which is the bulk of a finance income.
Is this the same sort of thing Windows 95-XP had before Vista added DWM?

Back when videos wouldn't show up in screen shots and their position on screen could sometimes gets out of sync with the window they were playing in?

I never fully understood what was happening but my theory at the time was that the video was being sent to the video card separate from the rendered windows.
I was trapped in a room with a hungry lion. I gave it some meat spiked with drugs. The AI ignored the meat and decided that I only gave it the drugs. The lion died immediately. According to the AI, I was deeply saddened by this unintended consequence. So, obviously I did not survive. What?
It probably scared the downstream, see Microsoft pushing out a press release as soon as possible since they have been investing tons of money and PR into their OpenAPI partnership and needed to calm their investors and partners.
This is awesome! Are you open for suggestions?
Ask HN: Real risk of using an unpatched phone
Reading some discussions on HN, it looks like many people claim that using a phone which no longer receives security updates is a terrible idea because the probability of you getting hacked dramatically increases.

On the other hand, millions of people in the world run unpatched Android phones everyday and yet I cannot find any significant report of them being hacked because of this.
It looks like most vulnerabilities are only really exploited in targeted attacks to specific personalities (activists, journalists, etc.) and the ongoing discussion about the topic is mostly speculation.

So, really, how unreasonable am I being in using an unpatched phone? (All the apps and the Play Services are still being regularly updated)

I don't like being forced to replace a still functioning device, but if there's any real high-probability risk I guess it's just the most sensible option.
"Loses" is kind of an incorrect way to talk about the launch. The flight made great progress and was just shy of orbital velocity (it was over 24,000 km/hr and orbital velocity is around 24,500 km/hr for a low orbit).

Keep in mind that the goal of this launch wasn't to carry any payload. It was to get data and further iterative development. People here, especially, should understand how iterative development works.
It's hard to forget how this stuff works though. It's just theatre.

You obviously shouldn't be able to walk off with a model but especially with hindsight I could bang out some models I've worked on very quickly as long as the infrastructure was amenable
Ah, misunderstood, my apologies and agreed.
related & useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20061078

Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well (pragmaticengineer.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37033403

Some tactics for writing in public (jvns.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118883

Writing about what you learn pushes you to understand topics better (addyosmani.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143853

Vim Is Saving Me Hours of Work When Writing Books and Courses (nickjanetakis.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854332

Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim (keleshev.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24628549

Writing a book: is it worth it? (kleppmann.com)
You are talking about the people not only doing the work and creating the wealth, but doing the innovations and creating new things. Then you say these are the people who are "too full of themselves". That they should give up on how the commodity they create is used - and by your definition it is a commodity. That they should focus on the needed innovations and that's it.

Well if the workers doing the work don't have a hand in making decisions, who does? We know the answer, from our current era of heirs, limited partners and such, the scions one can see on Rich Kids of Instagram, although they leave the work to their private wealth advisors.

It's the most parasitic idea possible. "Just do all the work and figure out the innovations slave, the aristocracy will take it from there".
In spite of this, it was still a great success.
What Happened to Sam Altman?
All the previous 'screen time harmful' studies are also self reported.
So, my state has laws on the books to explicitly protect reasonable solo outdoor play.

I still get reported by random people if my kids are outside, in our own front yard, without a visible parent watching. They call the cops, sometimes other agencies.

The police come and lecture me with a tone that I shouldn't do anything that might cause someone to call. That they shouldn't be in our own yard without direct supervision.

The agencies will sometimes come do a "wellness check" when you have enough reports against you. It's really creepy having state agencies looking for problems at your place that have nothing to do with the reports.

If you fail they can haul off your kids. Lots of rumors that they can be capricious and don't require any court proceedings.

So I don't let my kids play much outside. Nobody seems to care what is reasonable or legal.
Impacts of Biomagnification on Aquatic Ecosystems
all my Alexa echo etc were collecting dusts for the last few years,I got all I needed from my phone,there is no need for Amazon devices at all for me
Psychosis and Psychedelics