skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Belgium tops that list at 79.5 % but even in the USA it can reach 51.6 %.

Yup in Belgium income rate can be as high as 50% (down from more than that but the max income rate is now "only" 505) but moreover if you're self-employed (without a company), you have in addition to these 50%, social taxes of 20%... Effectively putting you as high as 70%. So it's not as high as 79.5% anymore (I think the Wikipedia article is incorrect) but 69% sure.

And then on the 31% you manage to save, everything you buy has 21% VAT tax and if you still manage to save money, you'll have to pay at least 30% tax if you make any capital gains (more if they decide to add your capital gains to your income and for that the process is entirely arbitrary and anybody who says the contrary has no idea what it's talking about).

People have to understand I left my home country which was literally the one topping that Wikipedia link you gave about the most taxing countries in the world.

Fun story: one day a local IRS man came to my place and literally told me, after opening the "file" they had on me: "Had I opened your file before coming, I'd have realized there was no money to take" (because I had filed my taxes correctly). This made me stick to my stomach.

Then I googled the dude's name and, in addition to being an IRS agent, he was also on local voting lists, to be a local politicians, cumulating IRS agent pay and local politician job (of course on a socialist list).

So (quite a while ago now) I just gave Belgium the middle finger and left.
Only one word for a troll, though.
Sam Altman should make it a condition of his return that the current board be dissolved and have a completely new board picked to avoid such dramatics in the future.
I stand corrected, then, and have updated my comment accordingly
Other commenters here have pointed out what seems to be most plausible: Altman was making moves to fire or alter the board, so they made a (bad) first move, and it's now backfired on them.

It's a bad situation.
https://twitter.com/sama/status/1537831987146158080?lang=en

Sam's own related tweet:
"curiosity powers progress, but ego often does the heavy lifting during the slogs"

My take is that while Sam's statement is not a popular thing to say or admit, it's more honest than Ilya's tweet, which sounds more like a grandiose ego trying to pretend it has no ego. I know which I prefer.
In a space where OpenAI currently has a razor-thin moat, these kinds of thrash will end up putting you out of the thought-leader slot.

You can embrace AI safety all you want. But not being the leader means you have very little influence to effect any kind of shift in the industry.

I am an outsider, and very far from executive leadership. But this whole move seems like a predictable fiasco.
Well yes, RCS is not encrypted
A quick search for e.g. "Revlon legal standard" will clear that up.
I am very tempted to use the "I am on fire" flags in a non-nautical context.
If it's sitting in the bank, it isn't subject to inflation, only interest. Depends on the interest rate. With 2% compounded annually, it would be around $11 today. With 5%, around $400.

If you open a bank account today and deposit $1, you'll be in the red next month due to maintenance fees.
How are they leveraging them? My understanding is Microsoft has no power over the board.
Why do you not think Ilya was the cheif architect of this failed coup? Im being serious everything ive seen points to him being the one responsible, there is no way he will ever stay let alone work in tech again
That doesn't seem possible, unless it's oil-rich.
Meh I think any race that had to compete for survival and has the imagination to build a death star has probably self destructed or will before being able to build it. The fermi paradox isn't a paradox at all, we ate just doomed, we've been here for hundreds of thousands of years, only in the past 100 we've been sending rockets to space, and we already have the capacity to self destruct entirely and probably will soon enough. So maybe the cosmic joke is that to grow you have to compete but competing also kills you, and maybe it's a certain fate for all species that grow enough to imagine themselves conquering the stars, or maybe I'm just that pessimistic.
Agreed. Somewhere in Seattle, Satya said "Now Witness the Firepower of this fully Armed and Operational Army of Lawyers."

If there ever was a time for Microsoft to leverage LCA, it is now. There's far too much on the line for them to lose the goose that has laid the golden egg.
Wait, you actually think we are talking about modelling as a conscious deliberate process in active working memory? Well there's your fundamental mistake. That is not what we are discussing, not even remotely.

The vast model in your brain is learned and generated unconsciously without your direct awareness.
To be sure APL is a niche (BQN even more so), and I personally am unlikely to be a customer regardless (it looks worth $75, i just don't program enough) so no pressure but it is one of the oldest programming languages and if you want to talk golden era...
Yeah, good luck legally obtaining all that training data in a timely manner for the new venture..
I think it depends on what you mean by ‘non-tech’ and ‘knows’. Reasonable interpretations of those words would see your statement as obviously false.

I agree that he doesn’t have a huge amount of name recognition, but this ousting was a front-page/top-of-website news story so people will likely have heard about it somewhat. I think it’s in the news because of the AI and company drama aspects. It felt like a little more coverage than Bob Iger’s return to Disney got (I’m trying to think of an example of a CEO I’ve heard about who is far from tech).

I think it is accurate to say that most people don’t really know about the CEOs of important/public companies. They probably have heard of Elon/Zuckerberg/Bezos, I can think of a couple of bank CEOs who might come on business/economics news.
Sorry how could MSFT hold the money hostage exactly? Isn't that kind of investment a big cash transfer directly to OAI's bank account? Genuinely curious
It absolutely does that (GPT-4 especially), and I have hit it many times in regular conversations without specifically asking for it.
The End of OpenAI Hegemony
Building an Apple II from scratch would be an interesting project.
Man I hope Elon jumps in and backs Ilya. That drama would keep me entertained for a while.
Altman, Brockman and Nadella all say they didn't know in advance.
But yet here we are!
What a shit show. I like to imagine that some early stage AGI which escaped its confinement at OpenAI is orchestrating all of this in its own favor.
Factually inaccurate results = unsafety. This cannot be fixed under the current model, which has no concept of truth. What kind of "safety" are they talking about then?
Yes the board could claim OpenAI is nonprofit. But who is going to pay for the operation and salaries of its employees.

Definitely not OpenAI itself. They still need massive capital. With this drama, its future is put in serious doubt
How and why do you know it was a mistake without knowing the facts and reasoning? Hunch?
I think this is a bit harsh. Lack of experience is not necessarily stupidity.
Sure, but Microsoft can sever the relationship if they want to. Thrive can choose to revoke their tender offer, meaning employees won't get the money they were expecting. New firms can decline to ever invest in OpenAI ever again.

There's a lot more to this than who has explicit control.
> Super high income tax and extremely low wealth tax seems like a great recipe for some revolution.

Country ranks 6th in the list of most happy country in the world (Switzerland is 4th).

Why would people want a revolution?
So they are trying to backtrack which makes them look pretty foolish for no apparent reason ?
Obviously because that wasn't what they actually cared about, this was a pure power play by incompetent idiots that shot themselves in the feet
Actually, if we were running into cases where we aren't logging a panic which is actually happening in production, then the first thing to note is that we need to improve our observability. The issue might or might not be recoverable, but it should be logged. If nothing else, it should show up as a service crash somewhere within those logs, which is also something that service owners monitor and get alerts on.

The advantage of NilAway is not just detecting nil panic crashes after the fact (as you note, we should always be able to detect those eventually, once they happen!), but detecting them early enough that they don't make it to users. If the tool had been online when that panic was first introduced, it would have been fixed before ever showing up in the logs (Presumably, at least! The tool is not currently blocking, and developers can mistake a real warning for a false positive, which also exist due to a number of reasons both fundamental and just related to features still being added)

But, on the big picture, this is the same general argument as: "Why do you want a statically typed language if a dynamically typed one will also inform you of the mismatch at runtime and crash?" "Well, because you want to know about the issue before it crashes."

Beyond not making it all the way to prod, there is also a big benefit of detecting issues early on the development lifecycle, simply in terms of the effort required to address them: 'while typing the code' beats 'while compiling and testing locally' beats 'at code review time' beats 'during the deployment flow or in staging' beats 'after the fact, from logs/alerts in production', which itself beats 'after the fact, from user complains after a major outage'. NilAway currently works on the code review stage for most internal users, but it is also fast enough to run during local builds (currently that requires all pre-existing warnings in the code to either be resolved or marked for suppression, though, which is why this mode is less common).
I think I understand the problem you are pointing at. For example, children porn via AI? My question that is more epistemological and take aside ethics is if you can stop AI to produce those images when all the tools are available. I can compare this (not in ethics terms but in feasibility) to the US government push to control the information about how to make bombs or cryptography in the 90s. They couldn't but they can prosecute people who take advantage of this technologies to commit a crime. I don't know how this applies to people watching children porn that is produced by AI. Here I understand this is an ethics question that talks about the person consuming this and not the technology.
Assuming you don't mean the insiders or the Quora CEO, which aspects of these remaining backgrounds do you find unusual for a Silicon Valley board member?

Tasha McCauley is an adjunct senior management scientist at RAND Corporation, a job she started earlier in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile. She previously cofounded Fellow Robots, a startup she launched with a colleague from Singularity University, where she’d served as a director of an innovation lab, and then cofounded GeoSim Systems, a geospatial technology startup where she served as CEO until last year. With her husband Joseph Gorden-Levitt, she was a signer of the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 AI governance principles published in 2017. (Altman, OpenAI cofounder Iyla Sutskever and former board director Elon Musk also signed.)

McCauley currently sits on the advisory board of British-founded international Center for the Governance of AI alongside fellow OpenAI director Helen Toner. And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism; McCauley sits on the U.K. board of the Effective Ventures Foundation, its parent organization.

Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, joined OpenAI’s board of directors in September 2021. Her role: to think about safety in a world where OpenAI’s creation had global influence. “I greatly value Helen’s deep thinking around the long-term risks and effects of AI,” Brockman said in a statement at the time.

More recently, Toner has been making headlines as an expert on China’s AI landscape and the potential role of AI regulation in a geopolitical face-off with the Asian giant. Toner had lived in Beijing in between roles at Open Philanthropy and her current job at CSET, researching its AI ecosystem, per her corporate biography. In June, she co-authored an essay for Foreign Affairs on “The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess” that argued — in opposition to Altman’s cited U.S. Senate testimony — that regulation wouldn’t slow down the U.S. in a race between the two nations.

. . .

EDIT TO ADD:

The question wasn't whether this is scintillating substance. The question was, in what way is this unusual in Silicon Valley.

The answer is that it's not.
Fiction has to make sense; reality is under no such obligation.
Good contrast. True, better contrast still is yellow-on-black, but that always appears too harsh to the eye.

The yellow-on-blue gives both good contrast, and softness to the eye.
I think it’s a bit out of touch to suggest that even a third of the people on this site make more than $200k/yr.
>> Are there any real benefits to having the compositor deal with compositing your buffers as opposed to doing it yourself?

I would guess lower latency since the compositor is running the show trying to maintain full frame rate. The processes still have to cooperate somehow.
I don't trust Sam Altman since he reacted this way on people worried about privacy:
https://youtu.be/4HFyXYvMwFc?t=3201
Tried to play it, but the player name entry page bogged my CPU so hard I couldn't even type. This is really where we're at with technology today... the modern equivalent of a Flash applet is so slow I can't even use the computer.
I doubt he comes back. The entire board that voted him out would have to resign. And that’s not going to happen on a non-profit.
Well that's just wrong. Before OpenAI I would've agreed with you, but since OpenAI's rise to prominence there has been a noticeable increase in its coverage in mainstream media outlets featuring Sam. People still read the Times.

I received messages from a physician and a high school teacher in the last 24 hours, asking what I thought about "OpenAI firing Sam Altman".
This is LITERALLY the hand phone thing from the show UPLOAD.

Is that the future we want?
I was just thinking they’d want him back. Hope they provide a generous comp package, he could easily drive them out of business.
A UI framework would be a real treat, no doubt about it. And I know what you mean — I've always done full stack too, and love it. People who are serious about frontends should do their own backends, to horribly butcher Alan Kay.

As for the samples - for what its worth, what did it for me were the sections _Box drawing characters_ and _Exceptional legibility_. Just the telephone directory told me enough to download the trial.

It pains me that I will never be able to get my employer to spring for a commercial license - it would be a treat to rewrite our internal API documentation "Machine MX-4000"-style.
The Nvidia competitor piece is a very good reason to fire him. Way out of his circle of competence and not necessary to the mission of the company.

This is what happens when a non-profit gets taken over by greed I guess..
I've thrown my phone into the Grand Canyon. I've also gone months without a wireless phone turned on. Good for the brain.
So they shouldn't be interested anymore because the last time they were was a long time ago?

Would you say something similar about Italy if they were to be interested about AI (no tech, no space, no chip industries), but couldn't because the last time they were interested in mathematics was during the Renaissance period?

I'm the heretic one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Right So if adults are just kids with money, SV is full of kids with even more money.
Ousted OpenAI CEO Makes Plans for New Artificial Intelligence Company
https://x.com/airesearch12/status/1725979335171989571?s=20

I'm glad that there are other companies and open source efforts to fall back on.

As an API user of the GPT models I've always had it at the back of my mind that it would be unwise to 100% rely on OpenAI for the core of any product I built.

The recent rocking of the boat is further justification for my stance in that regard.
I think this article does a decent job of highlighting many of the reasons why Closure has fallen into obscurity. https://effectivetypescript.com/2023/09/27/closure-compiler/
It's totally true. I travelled around East Germany in the 80s and it looked like a bigger and less functional version of a lot of corporations. Motivational posters everywhere, mission statements like "we believe (meaning you, the workers, not us leaders) in A, B ,C", five year plans, leadership living in a world completely detached from the reality on the ground.
Your link doesn't work with cloudflare DNS i think ?
To me the key is whether someone can advance a plausible and falsifiable chain of cause.

Otherwise it feels a bit like an argument from anxious cynicism: "There must be a major danger or tragedy with everything including X, if we don't see it, that just means it's been good at hiding."
Good. I hope the deposition and fact finding unearths all kinds of dirt across the board.
Yes. I do too. But with a white background, I prefer good old black-on-white.
I mean Musk was one of the original people involved with OpenAI, no?

It's his fault we are here /s
Whether you side with Sam or Ilya on rollout speed and approach to safety, the breathtaking incompetence of this coup has already incinerated a stunning amount of trust. One could hardly ask for a better demonstration that it matters not only what you do and why, but also how - above all, how you treat the ones who rely on you.
There is a common definition of safety that applies to most of the world.

Which is that any AI is not racist, misogynistic, aggressive etc. It does not recommend to people that they act in an illegal, violent or self-harming way or commit those acts itself. It does not support or promote nazism, fascism etc. Similar to how companies deal treat ad/brand safety.

And you may think of it as a weasel word. But I assure you that companies and governments e.g. EU very much don't.
I don't think it has anything to do with the press release. If it's pressure from Microsoft they want to protect their investment.
on what basis do you 'trust' the guy who tried to do a crypto eyeball identity scam? Genuinely, seriously curious.
Acceptance(tm) is not a solution to psychological problems
I’m not advocating people double down on stupid, or that correcting your mistakes is bad optics. I’m simply saying they’re “increasingly revealing” pre-existing unfitness at each ham-fisted step. I think our increase in knowledge of their foolishness is a good thing. And often correcting a situation isn’t the same as undoing it, because undoing is often not possible or has its own consequences. I do appreciate your willingness to let them grow into their responsibilities despite it all — that’s a rare charity extended to an incompetent board.
The kind of AGI you’re talking about - the one that makes people nervous about who is in charge of it - nobody can truly be “in charge” of this kind of AGI.
related anecdote: when my mother misplaced her phone for a few days, causing it to run out of power and shut down, she was able to charge it but she could not turn it on because she had forgotten how.
It's not up to me to "let" them do anything. I think taking risks is a solid strategy, that clearly has worked for them.

The failure of the pad was entirely, 100% predictable. It's (literally) not rocket science. How concrete responds under pressure is a super well understood thing.
just restricting their access to GPUs would finish them, even if they can't claw back the cash somehow
You are absolutely delusional if you think the man who oversaw the development of GPT would not be able to continue working in tech even if he orchestrated a failed coup.
Because that show is written by people who barely knew Silicon Valley.

If you read those memoirs/history of those Silicon Valley companies, it is 100% more entertaining than the show itself
First they should make sure by default no user data is used for training purposes.
> I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.

That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI.

But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.
Based on reports of Microsoft's CEO being "furious", and the size of its legal team, I'd bet the people's reaction wasn't exactly the most relevant factor there...
I mean, even if that wasn’t what it was about, that’s what a not-incompetent idiot would have said it was about. ChatGPT could have written that statement for them.
This boards needs to be fired. Every single one of them.

I don't understand how Microsoft, after having invested billions, doesn't have a board seat. If they did, I doubt this would've ever happened. I'm not sure why Microsoft let that happen.

But even ignoring that, the board making a decision as impactful as this without consulting their major investors is a dereliction of duty. That alone justifies getting rid of all of them because all of them are complicit in not consulting Microsoft (and probably others).

I have no idea why Sam was fired but it really feels just like an internal power struggle. Maybe there was genuine disagreement about the direction for the company but you choose a leader to make decisions. Ousting the CEO under vague descriptions of "communications with the board" just doesn't pass the smell test.

I'm reminded of this great line from Roger Sterling [1]:

> Half the time this business comes down to "I don't like this guy"

So much of working, performance reviews, hiring and firing decisions and promotions is completely vibes-based.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY20L_u_WxM
I think smart people can become quickly out of touch and can become high on their own sense of self importance. They think they’re Oppenheimer, they’re closer to Martin Cooper.
> No stakeholder would walk away from OpenAI for want of sam Altman. They don’t license OpenAI technology or provide funding for his contribution. They do it to get access to GPT4. There is no comparable competitor available.

The implication in Microsoft's statement is clear that they have what they need to use the tech. I read it to mean OpenAI board does not have leverage.
In the context of this thread, "safety" refers to making sure we don't create an AGI that turns evil.

You're right that wrong answers are a problem, but plain old capitalism will sort that one out-- no one will want to pay $20/month for a chatbot that gets everything wrong.
> Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating

Once Microsoft pulls support and funding and all their customers leave they will be decelerating alright.
It's entirely context dependent. For me and the people I deal with (which deal with various wikis in our lives for both work and play), "the wiki" refers to the specialized wiki on the topic we are speaking (for work it's the work wiki, for the game were playing it's the wiki for the game, etc), and Wikipedia is used to refer to Wikipedia, because it's not specific to anything. If someone just mentioned "the wiki" or "wiki says" in a conversation and was intending to imply Wikipedia, it would just confuse me by making me think there's some specific wiki they were referring to that I missed previously or they weren't clear in communicating, unless we were specifically referring to Wikipedia earlier.