skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gygax had fucked off to Hollywood and was too busy fueling his alcohol, cocaine and adultery addictions to spend any time actually running the company. All while TSR was losing money like crazy.

The company was barely making 30 million a year while 1.5 billion in debt...in the early 80s.

Even then, Gygax's downfall is the result of his own coup, where he ousted Kevin Blume and brought in Lorraine Williams. She bought all of Blume's shares and within about a year removed any control that Gygax had over the company and canceled most of his projects. He resigned a year later.
OpenAI (the nonprofit whose board makes decisions) has no investors.

the subordinate holding company and even more subordinate OpenAI Global LLC have investors, but those investors are explicitly warned that the charitable purpose of the nonprofit and not returning profits to investors is the paramount function of the organization, over which the nonprofit has full governance control.
You were the lion, looking at a mirror.
Privileged access to technology, which has paid off quite well for them already.
When have trains gone missing?
I'll just say it: Jobs being pushed out was the right decision at the time. He was an abusive and difficult personality, the Macintosh was at the time a sales failure, and he played internal team and corporate politics that pit team against team (e.g. Lisa vs Mac) and undermined unity and success.

Notable that when he came back, while he was still a difficult personality, the other things didn't happen anymore. Apple after the return of jobs became very good at executing on a single cooperative vision.
> the board (at least what remains) seems to disagree strongly with the direction in which the organization was headed

Yeah that is clearly the case, but when you have a situation where four of the six board members execute a coup against the two most powerful and important board members (the CEO and the chair), the company looks like a shitshow and nobody is going to want to work there or partner with them, at least until they are able to present a credible narrative about what they did (which may never happen).

Totally get the fact that the four remaining board members didn't like where things were headed, but their actions yesterday created a tremendous amount of collateral damage that will massively impede OpenAI in its journey toward whatever new azimouth they choose.
This doesn't seem like a major difference, since LLMs are also choosing from a probability distribution of tokens for the most likely one, which is why they respond a token at a time. They can't "write out' the entire text at a time, which is why fascinating methods like "think step by step" work at all.
Perhaps they didn't like the work they were doing? If they're experts in the field, they may have preferred to continue to work on research. Whereas it sounds like Sam was pushing them to work on products and growth.
Which proves my point. This cult on top of someone that simply convinced people (they knew from their connections) being considered a genius is absurd.
I thought the for-profit AI startup with no higher purpose was OpenAI itself.
Hide my infrared signature created from my missile launches? This second amendment thing has gone too far…
yeah but it used mixed.

E.g. I had 3m garden leave (paid, no bonus) and 3m non-compete (unpaid).
Portability and reproducibility means that the same code runs nicely in different envrionments.

A container or VM with a specific version of an OS and packages is the exact opposite of portability.
I am on the intellectual side, this article reads like a protracted fart piped directly into one’s own nostrils
I feel like some survival outcomes are entirely just random. It might need some more weights applied to the choices players make.
NO. i've tossed about posting an "Ask HN" a handful of times asking "Why are font sizes enormous these days?"

i am regularly distracted by sites with huge font sizes, leading me to double check if i'm zoomed in. body texts generally average out to be around 20px, with many even larger.

can someone explain what's going on here? i'm assuming it has something to do with supporting both mobile and desktop, but are that many people explicitly setting the pixel size and/or 150% font size?
What does the theory of capitalism have to say about people who do the work but never get the carrot?

No True Scotsman in 3, 2...
One of the most striking things about ancient Greek and Roman literature is how dehumanising it is about slaves, especially when slaves were regarded en masse, as a class, and not as individual human beings. In those societies, slaves could and were regularly beaten, raped, or killed with impunity. Compassion is indeed a perennial human emotion, and it must have existed because some slaves were set free (though even here this could have been due to a master’s fondness for a slave that arose out of e.g. sexual exploitation of the latter). Yet at the same time, mass killings of slaves in ancient literature – and this is something depicted on a number of occasions – do not feature the same poignancy as modern Western readers would expect.
Having nukes protects you from other nuclear powers through mutually-assured destruction. I'm not sure whether that principle applies to AGI, though.
Yeah, this is a good question. It could be from the engines, but nothing should change at that point that I can think of, since it's well before shutdown. It might also start to vent something, intentionally or not.

I hope they tell us.
GPT–2 was the first model that created long-form and coherent text.

The research led to a technology with a simple use case: input / output.

The "product" is a chatbot. input / output.

There is no innovation in interface or product design.

All the magic – all the "product innovation" is in it creating coherent text output.

(OpenAI's UI is not really that great).

All attempts at "product" (as in serving a specific use case tailored to a specific business or commercial workflow) that OpenAI have led to date – i.e. plugins – have been a huge flop.

I am uncertain who is behind assistants interface design to make RAG so easy. It's usability is underpinned by the larger context window of GPT-4T.

All of the magic is in the underlying technology. And I think Ilya's at the core of it. Yes, Attention Is All We Need is the Google paper that invented the transformer.

Ilya also worked at Google and was a key part of the ecosystem, and I imagine had indirect (and most likely very direct) contributions.

He is one of the most cited computer scientists of all time.

Without Ilya, I don't think we'd have the hype right now.

Someone would have come to the same conclusion, I'm sure.
It depends on the application. 4K on a camera that's high up and covers a lot of area is good because you see more pixels on objects. Also stuff like identifying people's faces or license plates. 4K for a camera that is close up, like say a doorbell, is IMO less useful.
> He is assuming people sit down and write things like web browsers in a single, linear sitting

I can't imagine how someone with 10 years of programming experience would make this assumption.
I don't think writing bubble sort from scratch without mistakes is necessarily a good demonstration of someone's ability to "handle the basics"

Realistically you will never need to write it yourself unless you're coding in some very specific domains

It's at most a signal for whether or not they remember algorithms 101 or some leetcode exercise, but knowing that they do remember isn't really useful to me
It isn't a coup. A coup is when power is taken and taken by force, not when your constituents decide you no longer represent their interests well. That's like describing voting out a politician as a coup.

Calling it a coup falsely implies that OpenAI in some sense belongs to Sam Altman.

If anything is a coup, it's the idea that a founder can incorporate a company and sell parts of it off, and nevertheless still own it. It's the wresting of control from the actual owners in favor of a public facing executive.
For the developments on First Nations lands, will those housing units be open to all or just band members? If the former, how do the legal aspects work for those who are not members of that band? I always got the impression that First Nations land, even inside of cities, were mainly populated with members of that band.
As smart as the people are at OpenAI they sure do some incredibly stupid things.

I guess it proves that this "company" is ran by scientists and not business people, which I guess is reassuring?
Yeah it is almost entirely province wide and pretty much every lot is going to be allowed to have 4 dwellings on it. Only the smallest lots (<280m^2 or <3000sqft) will be limited to 3 dwellings. The 6 dwelling regulations are still to come but I am optimistic they will be pretty permissive.

The other thing that I think a lot of people are glossing over is the requirement for the municipalities to plan and rezone for 20 years of growth every 5 years. No more having to apply for rezoning for a project that is in line with what the cities have planned.
Or the obvious point that if you're not interested in business use cases then where are you going to get the money for the increasingly exorbitant training costs.
How about signal (analog) dynamic compression? If he WM is embedded in the audio data then I won’t survive DA>compress>AD.
Also would be solid if it contained TTS.
Fontgate: Microsoft, Wikipedia and the scandal threatening Pakistani PM (2017)
Also why you should wear a ski mask in every bank, in case “something happens”
It doesn't matter in the short term (usually). Then you look in 2-4 years and you see the collective impact of countless decisions and realize how important they are.

In this case, tons of people already have resigned from OpenAI. Sam Altman seems very likely to start a rival company. This is a huge decision and will have massive consequences for the company and their product area.
Thanks for writing something like this.

I've come to feel that while I love reading HN, it's quite toxic as well. It's like the instagram of coding - every person is so smart, so authoritative, such breadth and depth of knowledge they are all making $300k/yr+ and profess how easy it is to find such a job. It can be really demoralising and even depressing for people who are struggling to be exposed to such potent concentration of things like that.

So it's great to hear someone being vulnerable and owning up to struggles.

I would say, my approach when I hit the types of feelings you express is always to drop down a layer to fundamentals. If X is hard, why is that? It probably means your knowledge isn't sound at some layer below the one you are working at. It sounds like a huge amount of your learning approach has been based on online learning and the issue with these is that they are usually very shallow. They teach you a direct skill but nothing underneath it. So drop down a level and just take time, to properly fill in those gaps. Steadily unravel what is going on one level down. Don't keep battering at the level above constantly getting frustrated. Build your knowledge at the level below. Learn the joy of patiently establishing a sound basis and a complete knowledge of the underlying principles on which something works.
Text to speech would be awesome!
So Elizabeth Holmes should have gone free? More so, if you were the victim of fraud, you should not be able to get your money back in court, because a lie is speech, and speech must always be free from state intervention?
A bit hard to GPS jam a rocket on the way up.
OpenAi’s tools are available to most people, not really just the rich and powerful.
Elegant operates from within the United States of America, and we can say what we want without your approval as per the first amendment of the U.S. constitution correct?

I gave you credit, did everything you asked, kissed your butt, asked you to let me join your project.

You are just scorn over something and have decided to come to the internet and spread lies and slander our name.

It’s reassuring though to see the large majority of comments on this thread say that I didn’t do anything wrong, and tough shit on your part.

Get over it already, and work on fixing your bugs and user friction so that I can use your code directly in my project without having to rewrite it unit tests and solid design principals.
Coding is hard exactly the way painting is hard or sculpting is hard or playing guitar is hard or writing is hard. It is but it's not. You need to put real effort in to learn, some less if you're naturally inclined to it, and many reach a point where they crest ahill and it really isn't that hard at all anymore.

If you're chasing after it as a career and coding feels persistently hard and unnatural, you might be aiming for a career not really suited to you. On the other hand, if you think making software is cool and you're just quite finding it easy all the time, keep grinding and you may get there. At least in this latter case, you'll be grinding on something you care about as you try to get there. If it's just about money (be honest with yourself), that can be found in a lot of places and some of them might come a lot more easily to you.
"Secret" should be covered by NDA and/or patented.
Perhaps they went missing when it was cloudy?
Silicon Valley Boardroom Coup Leads to Ouster of an AI Champion
100% sure he was fired because he started some side hustle to get a bigger chunk of the ai cake. In a few we will have some launch of a new venture and a bunch of openai peeps will flip over to the new co.
"Gardening leave" just means that during your notice period (or part of your notice period), you're not "working" in the sense of going to the office, but instead you're home ("tending your garden"). The idea is that during that time, you're not gaining new knowledge / IP, so by the time you actually start working your knowledge is several months out of date.
I have been giving advice to a person, young also (16 years old) and he thinks he can go very far very quickly.

I told him to be patient, to insist, to commit time learning not only typical courses of how to code your website with a database. In fact I gave him advice against doing that first.

I adviced him to learn binary/hex, algorithms, data structures and structured programming as a minimum. Also how a machine works (at least the abstract model): memory addresses, data, pc.ñ, call stack... etc. Interpeters vs compilers, some OS basics (though at first can skip most of this). My advice has been to first learn with Python and later C.

Understand why or when to use functions, certain data structures, etc. Do increasingly difficult but basic exercises.

And specifically, develop a sense and taste, at the end, on how to figure out how to code a solution to a problem he never saw. Cost analysis also helps lots and must be learnt at some point.

This is what happens when you gothrough random courses, exactly:

> Maybe you’re still lacking fundamentals? Seems like your strategy so far has been to grind tutorials and crash courses. They will make you feel like you’re learning a lot in a short time but in the end you’ll still not know what you’re doing, and you’ll keep struggling when facing new problems that are outside of the scope of the tutorial.

That is SO true. You have to start from scratch. I mean it. Because when you see something like s stacktrace that goes from Python to your native library with memory addresses you will understand NOTHING when the time comes.

Programming is a discipline where you need a lot of practice.
Non-paywalled https://archive.md/sLsD8
Yes, I read "Attention Is All You Need", and I understand that the multi-head generative pre-trained model talks about "tokens" rather than language specifically. So in this case, I'm using "LLM" as shorthand for what OpenAI is doing with GPTs. I'll try to be more precise in the future.

That still leaves disagreement between Altman and Sutskever over whether or not the current technology will lead to AGI or "superintelligence", with Altman clearly turning towards skepticism.
OpenAI has received just a fraction of Microsoft's $10B investment
The profit focus being wrong seems so weird to me. It's an awfully expensive operation to run GPT-4 at scale and even now, it's rumored they are running the services at a loss. I understand the philosophical side, sure, but you can't just disregard all those massive GPU farms and staff tuning their models. AI is said to have created a new country in terms of energy use and OpenAI no doubt accounts for a large portion of that.
I was underwhelmed, but I got -20 upvotes on Reddit for pointing it out. Yes products are cool, but I'm not following OpenAI for another App Store, I'm following it for AGI. They should be directing all resources to that. As Sam said himself: once it is there, it will pay for itself. Settling to products around GPT-4 just passes the message that the curve has stagnated and we aren't getting more impressive capabilities. Which is saddening.
Or contain, or counter, or be used as a deterrent. At least, I think that's the idea being espoused here (in general, if not in the GP comment).

I think U. S. VS Japan is not.necessarily the right model to be thinking here, but U.S. VS U.S.S.R., where we'd like to believe that neither nation would actually launch against the other, but both having the weapon meant they couldn't without risking severe damage in response making it a losing proposition.

That said, I'm sure anyone with an AGI in their pocket/on their side will attempt to use it as a big stick against those that don't, in the Teddy Roosevelt meaning.
I think these guys have explainers on their site:

https://lynk.world/
Depends on where your moral lines are. I have a fairly good sense of where mine are but I don’t know the board so I’m not going to make a guess there.
I think this is the correct url: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17xyo1m/its_he...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38323470

Dropping this link to another comment I made because people often forget what "fiduciary" actually means.

You see it all the time in legal dramatizations where the lawyer is telling the client that they can get more money, but the client tells the lawyer they just want the legal process to stop. The client gets their way because the lawyer has a fiduciary duty to them.

Edit to add: I'm curious what word "Revlon" was supposed to be.
> I wanted to prove to myself that I was smart, that all the adults in my life who told me I was "dumb and stupid" because I couldn't excell at school were wrong. I was not dumb, I was not an idiot, I could do it.

> And that was when reality slapped me really hard for the first time on my face.

These two consecutive paragraphs seem contradictory.
> It’d also help work around rules like the one my HOA imposes, where roof mounted solar can’t be street visible.

Bloody hell, some people just want to watch the world burn.
This is super misleading and sort of ambiguous. Are they claiming they eliminated any side channel information that can be used? I am confused here. The problem is anyone can collect various side channel information and use it as Meta data… Fully Homo. Encryption only helps after you’ve established secure links and to do that you will inevitably have to use a less secure link or system that which can be used in and of itself to make inferences about queries… The real issue is we don’t know if the “secure” systems we use that we don’t control actually give us the privacy they claim to…
it's not even the most efficient search. I don't think any sort method in a language would use a bubble.
Yes, people love to be dismissive of Jobs and call him just a marketing guy, but that is incredibly reductive for a guy who was able to cofound Apple and then come back and bring it back from near death to become the biggest company in the world. Marketing alone can’t do that.

Jobs had great instincts for products and a willingness to create new products that would eat established products and revenue streams. He was second to none at seeing what technology could be used for and putting teams in place that could create consumer products with those technologies and understanding when the technologies weren’t ready yet.

Look at what Apple achieved under his leadership and what it didn’t achieve without his leadership. Being dismissive of Jobs contributions is either a bad faith argument or one out of ignorance.
I'm pretty sure Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife isn't a CIA plant.
finally discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38283359
Context for HN :

It's 2 am here right now. I wrote this post very quickly in about 30 mins on the recommendation of a friend to just take my mind off things before going to sleep. I was not expecting it to get any real attention, and so did not attempt to provide much context in the post.

Genuinely appreciate your comments, especially those with encouraging, emphatic words and guidance. Also great to read your own personal journeys as well.

Although I started learning to code 10 years ago, I have not actually been actively coding for all these years. I have worked as a full time dev professionally for maybe just 3 months, and quickly moved into management roles from there.

My primary expertise today is more towards product management, sales, marketing, etc than coding. I currently work in a Enterprise Sales role, and my goal is still being an entrepreneur and building companies.

Zooming out and looking at my entire history, I have spent very little actual time coding. This is the primary reason behind the struggle I express in this post. I feel frustrated with how much little time I have put into it over the years, and how little progress I have made.

Also, perhaps important to note, I have diagnosed ADHD, chronic anxiety disorder and some level of bipolar as well. I don't like to attach these as part of my personality, but it explains a lot of my impulsivity, grandiose thinking and mood swings, which contribute to my frustration significantly as well. Also the reason why I could never learn well in classroom or with tutors. Self-learning has always worked better for me.

The post is intentionally very generic and vague, and doesn't give any specific examples of what I was struggling with and why, simply because it was more of an emotional post to express my frustration from the past week. I also have not written anything in a long time, so this was a good excuse for me to quickly write and publish something.

I recently started working on a new side project, and I have a team of people working with me, but we have been falling short of hands, and so I decided to get more involved in the development, and things were going great until last week when I started trying to refactor our codebase. I hit many walls with things I did not fully deeply understand, and struggling to keep track of a lot of different changes as I was making them - thus ending up breaking things and compounding my frustration even more.

I am currently strongly motivated to get better at coding. That is what prompted me to talk to my friend, who is the best engineer I know, and who encouraged me to write down my thoughts and publish them.

I am certain that with persistence and consistency, I would get through and not struggle as much as I have in the past week.
I think "repeatedly scanning" would be a better phrase.
> It's an extremely IP sensitive industry with stupendously high pay where the employee is going to someone probably competing very directly with you, for the same/similar opportunities.

Maybe it should not be IP sensitive. It would be the interest of public to bring more competition to the quant landscape and make their profit margins lower through the competition.
Yes. I'm sure they apply all the mitigations possible.

Worth mentioning that the previous state of the art solution relied on a radio link too. Not sure if it was an implementation where jamming could led to flight termination, or where jamming could lead to failure to terminate a flight. But jamming, and resistance to it, was a concern even before autonomous flight termination.