skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good companies are supposed to survive the exit of a CEO. No matter how good that CEO was. If those companies cannot, then perhaps their only value was the CEO and not the product they are offering.
This also caused a lot of trouble for time libraries in Rust. The two foundational libraries, chrono and time, rely on localtime_r to get the local time instead of the clock value in UTC. localtime_r reads the TZ environment variable (and optionally others like TZ_DIR). Rust declares it safe to modify the environment, while POSIX declares it unsafe.

CVE-2020-26235, RUSTSEC-2020-0071 and RUSTSEC-2020-0159 where opened against the crates. That left the Rust ecosystem with a pretty much unsolvable issue for many months. Chrono went with the solution to parse the timezone database of the OS natively and read the environment using the Rust locks. Time tries to detect if the libc version has thread-safety guarantees to access the environment, and otherwise panics if there are multiple threads.

More reading: https://docs.rs/chrono/latest/chrono/#security-advisories
I think GP is referring to servers. Linux may still be tiny on the desktop, but it dominates servers (and mobile)
Is this really opensource and/or free software? like code, data(set/s) and models?

I am quite tired to see some "open-source" advertisement, where the half or more is not really free.

general psa: please be honest in your announcements :|
Update:

Sam and Greg, and left OpenAI staffers now join in Microsoft

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
> metal road

TIL metal road is actually gravel road in NZ.
South Africa gets a lot of A340s, for some reason. Beautiful planes!
He spent 5 years at Tesla backing up their self driving lies for money.
unit vs integration is not low vs high level, that's a mischaracterization.
Sam Is Back
What is “nukes” though? Like the missiles in silos that could have been networked decades ago but still require mechanical keys in order to fire? Like is it just making phone calls pretending to be the president and everyone down the line says “ok let’s destroy the world”?
YouTube keeps showing me ads for online casinos even though I have marked Gambling as a "don't show me this" category in my profile. There doesn't not appear to be any straight-forward way to report this to YouTube. Perhaps they find the complaints too inconvenient.
Listen.

I was confused when the whole thing was going down.

I was more confused when the whole "board wants to backtrack and maybe resign" thing was going down.

I got even more confused when Emmett Shear was announced as the CEO.

...but never in a hundred years would I have imagined "haha just join Microsoft" as an actual alternative.

I remain, confused.
If you need games to motivate yourself, something is off. Don't take this the wrong way, but that is not a very sustainable way to keep going forward. You'll get tired of games way way earlier than learning a language
This actually seems like a decent compromise. Sam and Greg can retain velocity on the product side without having to spin up a whole new operation in direct competition with their old levers of power, and Ilya + co can remain in possession of the keys to the kingdom.
Java has System.getenv()... and it's an unmodifiable Map<String, String>. The real culprit it's the attempt to modify it, not C.
The Forbes article [1] from yesterday:

> The plan some investors are considering is to make the board consider the situation “untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/11/18/openai-in...

Edit: Looks like Microsoft just hired Sam outright: https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122
Wonder how long this will last. This team doesn't seem like a good fit for big corp Microsoft.

Good get by MS though!
OpenAI is destined to learn the story of Xerox PARC the hard way. I commend them.
Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are joining Microsoft
The number of board members should've increased alongside OpenAI's growth. Too few board members means the higher potential for corruptibility and too much power being held by each member. It makes no sense for OpenAI in the future to be worth $1T and a leader in AI while still being governed by a small inner circle.
> I remain, confused.

I think everyone is confused.
We have

github.com/[username].gpg

to get their OpenPGP keys, too!
Being able to hire researchers and, even the top talent doesn't guarantee that they'll be the top company or even succeed at what they're building.

This is what I referred as "Cargo Cult AI". You can get the money, but money is not the only ingredient needed to make things happen.

edit: Looks like they won't have a brand new company next week, but joining an existing one.
My experience was that most of the time it was the cable, followed by dirt in the port.

Now PCB quality can also wildly differ and the bonding between substrate and pads can be a weak point if the manufacturer of the device went for the cheapest possible PCB. But for that you have through-hole USB-C connectors and cables that should break before the connector.

So if your USB-C connector breaks off the PCB that is on the manufacturer of the device.
Anyone else find it strange that startup founders of the magnitude of Sam & Greg would join a gigantic corporation as employees?

It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.
Code or gtfo
devs want to see a README first :D
It's true they were professional in their press releases, but they still didn't explicitly say the reason he was fired, and so people keep speculating.
By joining Microsoft, they retain access to all the data, weights, and infrastructure they had at OpenAI. They don't have to start from scratch and ramp up. They can start up right where they left off.
>Unless they have some other technology that we don't know about, that maybe brought all this on, a GPT is not a clear path to AGI.

So Ilya Sutskever, one of the most distinguished ML researchers of his generation does not understand the technology ?

The same guy who's been on record saying LLMs are enough for AGI ?
But the likes of GM do?

https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/no-accident-insi...

> it meant GM had produced a part that failed to meet not only its own internal minimums for torque but also basic federal safety standards. For all safety-related defects, NHTSA requires auto manufacturers and part suppliers to notify the agency within five business days after learning of a flaw that could lead to an accident. GM had not.

> The documents showed that engineers first noticed the engine stalling problem way back in 2001, four years before Brooke purchased her Cobalt. What’s more, the Cobalt wasn’t the first GM car with a defective switch; that would be the 2003 Saturn Ion. Despite internal probes over the following decade that recommended changes to the key system, no changes were made. Indeed, GM appeared to double down on the bad ignition switch, integrating it into other compact cars, including the Chevy Cobalt, Chevy HHR, Pontiac Solstice, and Pontiac Pursuit.

> As it turned out, DeGiorgio’s 2006 order came four years after an email he wrote to the ignition switch manufacturer, in which he ordered the company, rather than fix the part and incur delays, to “do nothing.” The email was signed “Ray (tired of the switch from hell) DeGiorgio.”

> The report also described the disturbing pattern of disregard for the defect. This could be witnessed in gestures such as the “GM Nod”—in which GM employees affirmed the need for a plan of action, but understood no one actually intended on following through—and the “GM Salute,” described by one employee as the “crossing of the arms and pointing outward towards others, indicating the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me.”
Good work for Microsoft, moving swiftly to take advantage!
It’s really safe to say the big loser is OpenAI. Microsoft is effectively getting the team under their own overnight
OMG, it is 12am in SF. I need to sleep.

But what a play, MSFT the winner here.

They now owns the actual OpenAI

Edit: PM->am
I understand his achievements, but is he involved right now? Does he, nowadays, provide to the company anything other than his oversight?
Disney's Hotstar draws 59M concurrent viewers, setting new record
>Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable

Reel to reel players would like a word!
> No, there isn't a correct way to do anything in the real world, only in logic problems.

Agree to disagree? If there's one thing physics teaches us, it's that the real world is just math. I mean, re GOFAI, it's not like Transformers and DL are any less "logic problem" than Eurisko or Eliza were. Re counterfactuals, yes, the problem is uncomputable at the limit. That's not "unknown unknowns", that's just the problem of induction. However, it's not like there's any alternative system of knowledge that can do better. The point isn't to be right all the time, the point is to make optimal use of available evidence.

> buying castles

They make the case that the castle was good value for money, and given the insane overhead for renting meeting spaces, I'm inclined to believe them.

> scientific racism is real (though still buying mosquito nets for the people they're racist about)

Honestly, give me scientific racists who buy mosquito nets over antiracists who don't any day.

> getting tripped up reinventing Jainism when they realize drinking water causes infinite harm to microscopic shrimp.

As far as I can tell, that's one guy.

> And of course, they think evil computer gods are going to kill them.

I mean, I do think that, yes. Got any argument against it other than "lol sci-fi"?
Just imagine if this line of thinking was used elsewhere.

This tech is already out of the bag and I thank the author(s) for the contribution to humanity. The correct solution here is not to shove your head in the sand and ignore reality, but to get your government to penalize any country or company that facilitates this crime. If they can force severe penalties for other financial crimes and funding terrorism, they can do the same here.
My sole interest for motherboards in a stationary computer are for Windows gaming.

Flight sticks, wheels, button boxes basically everything that is wired use USB-A
and $$$$$ on marketing
When I got my book someone had already robbed the disc, reminds me I must contact the publisher.
Hinton makes cliched statements as if he's not given much thought to safety but feels obliged for whatever reason
If I visit a website and like it the first thing I do is look for an RSS/atom feed. I find more and more site instead want your email to send you emails that could easily be done with a feed. I don't visit those again. RSS/atom give the user control instead of the platform. I doubt they would exist if social media had existed before them.
The next QBR with MS is going to be interesting.
This may be a fair workable solution to all the parties involved.

Context:

---------

1.1/ ILya Sukhar and Board do not agree with Sam Altman vision of a) too fast commercialization of Open AI AND/OR b) too fast progression to GPT-5 level

1.2/ Sam Altman thinks fast iteration and Commercialization is needed in-order to make Open AI financially viable as it is burning too much cash and stay ahead of competition.

1.3/ Microsoft, after investing $10+ Billions do not want this fight enable slow progress of AI Commercialization and fall behind Google AI etc..

a workable solution:

--------------------

2.1/ @sama @gdb form a new AI company, let us call it e/acc Inc.

2.2/ e/acc Inc. raises $3 Billions as SAFE instrument from VCs who believed in Sam Altman's vision.

2.3/ Open AI and e/acc Inc. reach an agreement such that:

a) GPT-4 IP transferred to e/acc Inc., this IP transfer is valued as $8 Billion SAFE instrument investment from Open AI into e/acc Inc.

b) existing Microsoft's 49% share in Open AI is transferred to e/acc Inc., such that Microsoft owns 49% of e/acc Inc.

c) the resulted "Lean and pure non-profit Open AI" with Ilya Sukhar and Board can steer AI progress as they wish, their stake in e/acc Inc. will act as funding source to cover their future Research Costs.

d) employees can join from Open AI to e/acc Inc. as they wish with no antipoaching lawsuits from OpenAI
It’s a shame to see such important data, much submitted by the public to this charity, somewhat locked away. No API or downloadable dataset but to their credit you can apply for access: “The Ancient Tree Inventory dataset is available upon request. If you would like to access the data please get in touch.” I can imagine all sorts of great visualisation and insight within the data.
Seems like a very big step down to them.
CBDCs are fine, but not as the “solution to everything” that is getting pushed by the IMF.

Cash and barter economies are literally the core of freedom from tyrannical forces, and in the era of AI, the last thing any of us should want is our economies managed by a single ledger under one real-time system with unproven and intrinsically vulnerable centralized control.

Resilience to AI powered disruption looks like diversity in the economic realm, not low cost streamlined centrally managed systems.

Have they learned absolutely nothing from the Internet?
I would consider myself an Apple apologist, but I can't defend their graphs. They're truly unforgivable.
This was most unexpected. Hopefully it's a compromise reached mutually. Now OpenAI can fulfill what their mission is and these guys can work on AI products at MS.

Again. Very unexpected.
Do you understand why he was fired? The company had a charter, one the board is to help uphold. Altman and his crew were leading the company, and seemingly its employees, away from that charter. He was not open about how he was doing that. The board fired him.

This is like a bunch of people joining a basketball team where the coach starts turning it into a soccer team, and then the GM fires the coach for doing this and everyone calls the GM crazy and stupid. If you want to play soccer, go play soccer!

If you want to make a ton of money in a startup moving fast, how about don't setup a non-profit company spouting a bunch of humanitarian shit? It's even worse, because Altman very clearly did all this intentionally by playing the "I care about humanity card" just long enough while riding on the coattails of researchers where he could start up side processes to use his new AI profile to make the big bucks. But now people want to make him a martyr simply because the board called his bluff. It's bewildering.
Using environment variables for global mutable state isn't exactly good practice, is it?

I can't think of any time I had wanted to do that.

What exactly are the programs that break if this changes?
Friday was a year ago.
I thought for sure the only two outcomes were that Altman raises money for a new startup or he comes back to OpenAI with a new governance structure (which is still a wild and crazy outcome, but crazier things have happened). Now that this happened though, I feel stupid for not considering this as a possible outcome at all.

The whole timeline of events over the last two events still leaves me scratching my head though.
Is it Manufactoria? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5tU33d3U1k&t=90s)
SamAltman, Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft, says SatyaNadella: Bloomberg
Sounds like bundle theory to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_theory
I absolutely would use this for workshops I give, where users bring a variety of oddball hardware and want to do things like run FPGA synthesis or run software that pokes USB packets to communicate with debug endpoints.

In the past I've made sure to build for each platform in CI and distribute USB drives, and this just makes it one notch easier by letting me ship the same binaries to everyone.
Maybe Sam thinks OpenAI will be so important he has a shot at CEO of Microsoft in a couple years?
What value does Sam bring now? They have all the money they could want. All the connections they’d need.

Weird situation for him.
Not sure about the IP, but the team can get whatever they have access in the past. It certainly speed up the restart process
It’s not flame bait, it’s complaining that people look at other country politics like it’s the USA, when the situation in the local country differs substantially from what a regular American experiences.
A lot of people are making unsubstantive comments and flamebait, without the context that Argentina is in, with an economic situation that for the average American is unimaginable.
If you feel it’s flamebait, then I’m sorry for try to educate people about other countries they don’t have any idea about.
> I have watched him speak, and he doesn't seem charismatic at all.

Consider the relative charisma of the people around him, though.
Or they just acquired sales people
Maybe lunch and a coffee could help?
Ilya and co are going to get orphaned, there’s no point to the talent they have if they intend to slow things down so it’s not like they’ll remain competitive. The capacity that MSFT was going to sell to OpenAI will go to the internal team.
Changing the env during runtime is actually quite handy for debugging and forcing the program into specific states.

Other than that, it can also be handy in k8s with a VPA. You get more/less memory and then update the env to reflect that. Your service picks up the env change and updates the runtime.

IIRC, there is/was some way to listen to those changes in C#, and automatically update runtime settings.
> It sounds very out of line of what you'd expect.

Except if Sam and Greg have some anti-compete clauses. If they join MS, they have a nice 10 billion USD leverage against any lawsuites.
Did Microsoft just effectively acquire 100% of OpenAI without actually needing to cross the 49% regulatory hurdle? Depending on who follows them to MSFT, that might actually be the outcome here. And OpenAI is suddenly Xerox Parc.
Not quite, I did a search inspired by Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast, Laser vs Parchment:

https://timharford.com/2023/11/cautionary-tales-laser-versus...

Which contrasted this with the Windrush scandal where the Home Office destroyed the legal documents of people welcomed from the Caribbean in the Sixties, and in their absence started to deport them.

Update: that is an excellent video, setting the context of the problem and walking through the fix. I doubt I would have found it.
Not only that, Microsoft in practice is OpenAI's customer. So somehow OpenAI will be working for them.
Windows has an autodiscoverable system of plugins for media playback, you don't even know what codecs you load. Linux analog is gstreamer.
I live in SE Europe, 800k city, part of EU. This notion that public transport is well developed over here applies only to more developed parts of the continent. I am in Croatia and trains are... a joke to say the least. In a 800k city we don't have any notion of rapid urban transit. For us a tram is best you can get. Recently I took public transport for fun, took me 1h to get 9km and that's in 8pm, when there is no peak traffic.

I have to drive a car everywhere.
Sam and Greg obviously haven’t heard that Microsoft Research doesn’t get any GPU access (:
It certainly sounds out of line with all the reporting that Altman was talking about starting a new company and could trivially fundraise for it. Was that just as much kayfabe as the idea of bringing him back?
This was unexpected.
It’s handy to remove the “si” field from YouTube videos, it looks to be tracing.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it is us framed as if they won't be working on GPT-based products, but on research.

The whole thing reads like this to me: "In hindsight, we should've done more due diligence before developing a hard dependency on an organization and its product. We are aware that this was a mistake. To combat this, we will do damage control and continue to work with OpenAI, while developing our in-house solution and ditching this hard dependency. Sam & Co. will reproduce this and it will be fully under our control. So rest assured dear investors."
From the start I assumed that Sam was the (street) smarter guy here, and that only confirms it

Meanwhile Google remains oblivious
How do you know that? Maybe they wanted to ship AI products at an unprecedented speed at the most prestigious AI company in the world.
And for the OpenAI employees, they can just switch the badge in a blink second, it almost feel like a no-brainer to many.

I think Sam just took the easier route to rebuild OpenAI within MSFT.

Now the trouble comes to the SV VCs they now will be furious.
Care to elaborate? Microsoft funding OpenAI doesn’t grant them right to just grab intellectual properties.
Podcasts run on RSS
Agreed. Sam isn’t some AI visionary, he’s a startup guy. Unless he’s leading a team that’s going to spin out a new company, I don’t get it.
Maybe it’s time for thousands of Russian murderers, rapists, and pillagers to get out of Ukraine first?
It's not all, but you see plenty of it here.
Survivorship bias.

It's like saying don't worry about global thermonuclear war because we haven't seen it yet.

The Neandethals on the other hand have encountered a super-intelligence.
There are at least three competing perspectives.

One is Sutskever, who believes AI is very dangerous and must be slowed down and closed source (edit: clarified so that it doesn't sound like closed down). He believes this is in line with OpenAI's original charter.

Another is the HN open source crowd who believes AI should be developed quickly and be open to everyone. They believe this is in line with OpenAI's original charter.

Then there is Altman, who agrees that AI should be developed rapidly, but wants it to stay closed so he can directly profit by selling it. He probably believes this is in line with OpenAI's original charter, or at least the most realistic way to achieve it, effective altruism "earn to give" style.

Karpathy may be more amenable to the second perspective, which he may think Altman is closer to achieving.
It prompted me to look up the site, but I found this instead.
The problem with rural areas and cars is not usually getting from unincorporated settlement to the big city, it’s getting from your home in an unincorporated settlement to the Main Street of the closest city with a Walmart. Especially as you look eastward into the US, there is a spider web of tiny junction cites, settlements, town, etc, all would be difficult to serve with mass transit effectively.
The new CEO, (Emmett, not Mura, who was CEO for two days I guess) has publicly stated on multiple occasions "we need to slow down from a 10 to a 1-2". Ilya is also in favor of dramatically "slowing down". That's who's left in this company, running it.

In the field of AI, right now, "slowing down" is like deciding to stop the car and walk the track by foot in the middle of a Formula 1 race. It's like going backwards.

Unless things change from the current status quo, OpenAI will be irrelevant in less than 2 years. And of course many will quit such a company and go work somewhere where the CEO wants to innovate, not slow down.
That sounds rather interesting. Link to some examples of said chemical plants?
@sama @gdb joined microsoft
"OpenAI, the next huge tech company to rival Google" is a huge loser of this whole process, probably dead.

"OpenAI, the non-profit who only has a for-profit subsidiary to get enough resources to fund its mission to develop AGI" is probably a winner, and gets to live instead of slowly die.
Others from OpenAI team, maybe can lead the AI research, but how does Sam can lead a research group?

IMO, to lead a research group you need some decent research skills, Sam is good at business
Nope. They're following the path to power, money, and maybe continued fame. That's all.
The way Muslim countries do it strikes me as something I 100% do not want at home. Like, I do not want any of it at home.