skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When news like this hits the front page of HN, I wonder to what degree it's because HN has many readers of AS Byatt, and to what degree it's because Paul Graham or the ones running the show here happened to have read her work. If the latter, it's like PG&Co just getting us familiar with their particular culture.
Fun fact, a lot of tapes were recorded from either CD, vinyl, or FM radio. The audio quality objectively cannot be better than the source material and most people wouldn't have used high end recorders. In case of cassettes sold commercially, they would have been recorded from some master; usually the same as the vinyl or CD master. The cassette was the cheap mass market version of the same usually. Intended for people with a walkman or a car with a cassette radio built in, as was common in the eighties.

A lot of commercial cassettes would have had masters similar to other CDs optimized for playback on cheap consumer devices that teenagers could own. So that means lots of distortion, amplified bass, and wall of sound, etc. The pop music of the nineteen eighties used all the tricks there were to make music sound great on crappy hardware.

Using cassettes actually wasn't that bad. My first computer was a commodore 64 with a cassette deck as the only storage. Painfully slow but it worked. I taped songs from the radio to create my own mix tapes. Later I recorded full CDs as well. I never owned a record player. They were obsolete by the late eighties. I got rid of my cassettes fifteen or so years ago after realizing that I 1) did not own a cassette player anymore, 2) had not listened to any of them in ten years. I did not break a lot of them that I can recall.
Sacked OpenAI Boss Sam Altman to Join Microsoft
I dunno man. Doing innovation from inside Microsoft might be more difficult than if they had just formed a new startup. Microsoft as a brand has the stench of mediocracy upon it. Large companies are where ideas and teams go to die, or just rest and vest.
OpenAI forums for one. https://community.openai.com/

They don't really have customer support, so most of it is the community, and so you learn a lot on the flaws and strengths of LLMs.
How could this possibly happen over a weekend when it takes Microsoft weeks and weeks to go from recruitment to hiring someone?
Why is their ad business unsustainable? seems like they just print money, and recent efforts are to simply increase printer speed... Because why wouldn't you...
Meh.. I could but I have to tolerate them on TV anyway. I may look to install pi-hole one day.
I recall the Covered Market becoming a bus station in one Endeavour episode.
> If they didn’t fire him, Altman will just continue to run hog wild over their charter. In that sense they lose either way.

The story would be much more interesting if actually AI had fired him.
The vote for firing him effectively took place on Thursday at the latest, given that Murati was informed about it that evening.
This is the way.

I really don't understand why any technically proficient user would willingly use any of the official YouTube frontends. You get bombarded with ads, you're constantly tracked and experimented on, and your behavior is used to improve their algorithms in order to keep you on the site for as long as possible. It's a hostile user experience, just like most of the mainstream web.

Whenever possible, I suggest using Invidious, Piped, Newpipe, yt-dlp, and anything but the official frontends.

I try to compensate the creators I follow via other means if they have an alternative income source, but I refuse to be forced to participate in an exploitative business model that is responsible for the awful state of the modern web.
Mankind already pays for education and infrastructure.

Did OpenAI and others pay for the training data from Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, Github etc.
Or any other source produced by mankind?
First Sam Altman, then Kyle Vogt. Is Elon Musk from Twitter/X next?
What do you mean by "browsing" Youtube? Clicking new links for the purpose of entertainment?

My post was only about playing videos.
I lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to the heights in a second!
Free exchange obviously and provably is, but that's not _quite_ what's going on. I see a rapid trend towards regulatory capture, monopolization and setting up to siphon out money. All from the same few actors. And if history around tech hype serves us well, then we should be wary of a large, inflated bubble that is going to burst eventually, even if useful things are created meanwhile.
That's like saying we can solve aging and cancer by a combination of genetic and epigenetic interventions.

It might even work, if you could do it.

Actually doing that is going to be essentially impossible, though the reasons are completely different.
Generally people hate those.

Despite the fact that I fully subscribe to the precept of if you put it on the internet, then there's no expectation of privacy, I would still like to see some way for the twitter user to signal to stop the mirroring if they so desire.
>I'd recommend not reading rumors and waiting for things to come out officially.

Thanks for the breakdown. Unfortunately, you have just made things too saucy for me to take that advice :-)

Also, the rumors and machinations are a pretty big part of this story.

This is obviously a power struggle, for control over, potentially, the highest potential company/technology/IP of the current moment.

Power structure in the modern corporate/tech space.. it has become normal to charter a company such that ownership and control are effectively separate... call it overiding the defaults of incorporation and company law.

FB and Tesla are the big publicly traded examples. OpenAI, is the most significant private example. It is also illegible, at least to me, considering the structural complexity. Non-profit, for profit & capped-profit entities in a subsidiary loop. Separate arrangements for ownership, control, and sometimes IP across the mesh of entities...

Openai is like some abstract theory of company law..

For Tesla and FB, the CEO is central to the paradigm. Barring crisis, Zuck or Elon's control over FB & TSLA just is. They have cash flows, market caps to protect. Ongoing operations. Shareholders have no real interest pursuing shareholder control or any kind of coups.

OpenAI.. totally different game.

The IP (protected or otherwise), technology, team, momentum... These are all that matter. Product and revenue.. direct financial return on investments, and such.. these are not driving factors. Not for msft or other parties. Rare.

Everyone just wants to leverage OpenAI's success, to compete with their own partners. Mutual benefit, it's dubious right now.

This is not the www or most other tech/science consortiums.. imo. It's not about fooling resources, pushing the industry forward or going beyond the blue sky scope of individual company r&d.

It may have been that initially, but that changed with gpt3.

There's no point in being the bing to Google's AdWords... And that's the kind of game it is now.

So.. there is a ton well very interesting stuff going on here. My ears are certainly pricked.

Absolutely agree on the need to completely change views as this saga progresses. None of these dogs are mine.
If it’s not a sudden thing, the person being fired generally writes a ‘no bad feelings’ instead of a ‘WTF’ message.
When I ran into the adblocker-blocker (Firefox + uBlock Origin), I noticed that I could watch videos if logged out. So I just stayed logged out, and haven't seen an anti-adblock message since. Or an ad.

Added bonus, I'm less tempted to venture into the comments section...
The fact that there is an alternative doesn't change the fact that a lot of software relies on the worse method to work.
Something related to this which I find extremely frustrating is that I'm capable of watching a 4k video in my browser just fine. So if I decide to buy or rent a movie on youtube, they can only be played back at 420p.

Apparently this is due to DRM restrictions, but the frustrating part is that you can pay extra money for the HD version and there's nothing telling you about this not being supported in your browser until you've made the purchase (by just allowing 420p and needing to search for why it's broken)

see https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/pm0eqh/why_are_my_...
No, it's a reimagining not a reproduction and takes liberties with encounter and enemy design throughout the game. I don't mean to disaparage Black Mesa but if you want to play HL, play HL instead of pretending that some other similar game is the same.
Will it?

Doesn't it rely on processing power from MS who they've just royally pissed off and who's in the process of grabbing all the exiting talent to presumably build a competitor?
Is there some way for me to stay abreast of the things people post on Twitter without having to check my HN feed?
.NET Blazor
I think openAI will become the research lab, while the new group in Microsoft lead by Sam will focus on creating products.

I personally expect the chat.openai.com site to just become a redirect to copilot.microsoft.com.
Outlook and Thunderbird both handle RSS feeds directly and work as reader.
Yeah, it’s a matte painting.
Use Invidious, Piped or any other frontend that doesn't track and manipulate you.
Same here. With call forwarding our 24/7 support usually rang at my house. Night was the 'drunk shift' and usually login problems. One user was particularly edgy about his password and would not say it even to me, they were stored as crypts, so I could reset it. He said he had pasted it from another place (which probably means he forgot it and was too arrogant to admit it) Round and round until I checked the logs and he was trying to sign on with a pw of '********' which is how it had gone into the clipboard. Instead of engaging with him further I set his pw to that. Problem solved.

My greatest win was to add a few lines to our RADIUS server to flip case one time on bad logins, so if 'mYpASSWORD123' failed it would try 'MyPassword123' and let them in if it worked. Logs showed thousands of fixed logins per month and reduced tech support calls to less than a third. We declared victory over CAPSLOCK.
I wonder, how does orientation affect a watch with a Coaxial escapement?

Since they're a relatively modern innovation I'd guess they were never really used in commercial applications like marine chronometers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_escapement
My impression is that this was Golang's plan from the start - this is why they didn't want to use the C stdlib at all, issuing the Kernel syscalls directly from the Golang runtime. A good idea, but then they had to backpedal to solve issues such as DNS resolution respecting certain OS settings, and this bug is a symptom of that.
Who doesn't? libc itself calls getenv when getting system time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38344224

You may have a mutex on getenv/setenv, like the Rust stdlib does, but when libc doesn't look at that mutex, even on the read side, you run into UB.

So the next step is never calling into seemingly innocent libc functions in safe code (which you have to enforce on your dependencies as well), implementing safe alternatives to a good chunk of libc (and making sure your dependencies use those), to cordon off anything that looks at the environment. This makes a good chunk of POSIX functionality useless.
Using firefox I get "instant" youtube. The video starts playing before most of the rest of the UI has loaded even, definitely under 1 second.

Any idea what specifically causes it to happen, rather than just "firefox"?
I've had this slow down show up for me as well. I wonder if there's a non malicious explanation, although I'll admit I'm unable to think of a charitable interpretation.

Sometimes YouTube also disables features on my home page. For example, at the top of the home page there's usually a filter bar with various categories. I haven't figured out under what conditions this gets triggered, but there's times where the filter bar just disappears.
No grey market: it's legal to sell on used software licenses in the EU, see Directive 2009/24/EC article 4 para 2. I buy Windows PRO licenses for about 20EUR.

Laptops sold without Windows preinstalled are still a rare sight.
Senna v Prost?

Schumacher v Hakkinen?

Alonso v Vettel (2012)?

Hamilton v Rosberg (2016) ?

Hamilton v Alonso?

The whole of 2010?
I wish we could get some aliens to abduct all the people in these organizations and not return them. The aliens from "To Serve Man" can have them.
> Note that people ingest plastics all the time, e.g. through the breakdown of toothbrush bristles

Plastics are found in human blood/lungs/breast milk/placenta etc, so the concern is much stronger than just accidental ingestion from a toothbrush.

Read about effects of xenoestrogens, which a bunch of these plastics apparentlt are, and cross check with some realities of today.
True. I think the spark for me getting into computing was that my parents took me to a thing at Cambridge University in the mid-1970s when I was a child. The thing was for bright children and you could choose whatever you wanted to do and who to talk to. I chose to ask someone (either a professor or a postgrad) how a computer worked. This kind person sat down with a piece of paper and described a Turing machine. After that I went home and started imagining "programs" on paper. I didn't see a real computer until around 1980.
He has already indicated that he intends to slow development by over 90%.
OpenAI never gave equity.
Is there maybe some road map or purpose statement on this? it’s not that i don’t believe that this is absolutely true (i’m sure it’s the wet dream of all SV companies…) but google’s offerings are so inconsistent that if that’s really their goal i just can’t see how they mean to get there. every answer to competition is a half baked answer in my experience and i truly just can’t see how google means to do this. google plus i thought was supposed to be this but that did not pan out well at all.

and i also don’t see how they can really do this at least in EU, at least not for long until the regulators catch wind.
> yet provided absolutely no evidence for it.

Maybe the absence of evidence is the evidence in this case. (No lawsuits)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4GZUCwVRLs
>> There should be some balance

is all I'm saying. And I'm not interested in political debates. Neither right nor left side is good in long run. We have examples. More over we can predict what happens if...
Enhancer for Youtube allows you to select a min quality, also great for blocking shorts.
That was a very good decision because I think the majority don't understand well what has happened, even inside OpenAI itself, and that's very weird.
I don't have any I can personally vet on the public internet. Most of what I've seen is on the GTCEu discord. Image searching "nomifactory" yields some stuff that looks about right. "Lawn base".

https://i.redd.it/dpcixz3z60d81.png

Back in the 1.4.7 days the biggest packs out there were kitchen sink packs like MindCrack with GT3 being the biggest single mod. The gregtech family tree has grown substantially and the largest branches are much more intricate than what used to be around. On par with Krastorio2.
It is common, out of my head SDL and pipewire do it.
To be exact, it was Chrono and time-rs 0.1, while time-rs 0.2 and later was rewritten from the scratch and didn't have that issue... because the new time-rs didn't yet support general time zones other than fixed offsets. The accepted solution for Chrono surprised me a lot, because as far as I reckon it was the hardest solution. (Disclaimer: I'm the original author of Chrono.)

But a bad API design doesn't end at environment variables. Many POSIX systems rely on `/etc/localtime` to define the system-wide time zone, and every `localtime` call has to check if the file has been changed or not because there is no way to subscribe to the system-wide time zone change event. Of course there is a cache, but many libcs call at least `stat` per each `localtime` call AFAIK. I had even experienced a possible glibc bug due to the lack of guard against I/O error during this process [1]. Windows got this right, I can't see why POSIX couldn't do the same when it does have an asynchronous signal delivery mechanism anyway.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953898
Apple’s own argument is this isn’t true. A “major number of users” have iMessage turned on automatically, but aren’t active users.

If even Apple says iMessage isn’t used by at least 45 million EU citizens… (to qualify for gatekeeper status)
This is nothing new.
In 1913, Max Ringelmann measured the effort of individuals when working in a group.
The results are impressive:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54409695.image.f14

A group of 8 persons provides the same amount of work as 4 individuals.
At that high of a probability of doom, one could argue that the most ethical thing to do is to assassinate everyone involved in AI research. Probability of doom x number of people affected is .05 x 8 billion == 400 million, versus a few thousand AI researchers.

Of course, no one really believes the probability of doom is that high.
The UBo team commented on the Reddit thread that they were looking into it. So it may have already been fixed.
lol

This reply is for everyone who has ever worked on the codebase...
People were claming Facebook was dead a few months ago. We'll see.
no need to go that extreme, the fix is to just update ublock orgins filters

Go into ublock origin addon > click filter lists > purge all caches then update now

all done
This is a great overview of common mistakes in data viz I will be sharing it with my colleagues. As a good supplement I highly recommend Kennedy Eliot's "39 studies about human perception in 30 mins" https://medium.com/@kennelliott/39-studies-about-human-perce...

... a whistle stop tour around the research basis for a lot of claims around data viz best practice (esp interesting re the dogma around not using pie charts which seems to be a consistent bugbear of designers going back to the 1930's but around which the research is inconclusive at best)

[edit: fixed a typo]
It could also just be that there are different stories of the situation that led up to this thing blowing up, and nobody inside OpenAI could be trusted to impartially do fact finding in matching up those narratives.

People confabulate just like AI does. Just because the stories don’t add up doesn’t mean somebody deliberately lied.
I sympathize with your sentiment, but I don't think Go has anything to do with this.

The disregard for the fact that some engineers are more productive than others originates from companies' processes and planning. Projects are usually estimated without considering who will be working on the project and individuals are compressed to person-weeks. I have experienced it myself and read texts describing this issue in the same terms[1].

It doesn't really help that Go was designed in such a company, but saying that it was designed to mitigate this disparity is saying that the best predictor of an engineer's productivity is the number of LOC cranked out. I don't think that is the case, neither in principle nor in Google particularly.

Much better predictors of productivity are effective communication and conceptual integrity of the design, as the linked article points out. It doesn't really help that you use brilliant language if, 6 months in, you've realized you're building the wrong thing, or you build it in the wrong way.

1. https://danluu.com/people-matter
I don’t get it too. It’s akin to claiming that by hiring an Oracle executive you can build the best database tech. A little stretch but still. Chances are I’ll never understand how things like that work, because there must be few truths about humans my mind resists to believe.

My uneducated guess is that OpenAI really screwed up the PR part and the current Microsoft’s claims are more on the overall damage control / fire suppression side.
I think 30 days is pretty reasonable. He can't guarantee a statement by Black Friday or anything. Besides, he isn't bound to release it in 30 days. He could very well have something within 10 days.

But he just got the job and I'm sure many people are on PTO/leave for holidays. Give the guy some time. (And this is coming from someone who is pretty bearish on OpenAI going forward, just think it's fair to Shear)
I mean I really like Emmet. But they have essentially replaced a product person with fairly deep AI knowledge with another product person with much less AI knowledge?

Really sounds to me like he was just the only one available on a short notice.

They should have picked Elon for extra meme points at least.
This has been a source of tension at least since the release of ChatGPT, so… yeah it’s not like the problem came out of nowhere. The governance structure itself is indicative of quite elaborate attempts to reconcile it.
Ah, I didn’t know about the three vacancies. If the former board members in those slots all would have voted against these actions, then yes it probably meets my definition of a power play. But if any of them would have voted to take these actions, then the required majority may have been there even with the former full 9-member board, in which case it’s again not a power play.

Let’s assume for a second that it is a power play. If the point of it is just the power struggle between two factions seeking power then yeah it’s not a good thing to majorly disrupt an organization. But if the point of the power play is to rescue the nonprofit’s pursuit of its mission from a CEO’s misuse of power that goes against the mission, it’s a board acting exactly as it should, other than badly handling the communications around this mess.

I have no inside info and therefore am not expressing any opinion on what the truth is. But I’m not going to rush to believe the PR war being waged by Altman and his allies merely because the current board is bad at PR/comms.

I look forward to reading any public summary of the report from the investigation which the new interim CEO has ordered.
Gimp has a notoriously unusable UI. I think that's honestly probably the main reason.

I'm actually more confused by the converse: why do people keep using and recommending Gimp when Krita has existed for decades and is so much easier to use?
I've always had a sense that it's a combination of "readers of X" along with "people always interested in X's writing".

Stuff about writing and publishing in general gets upvoted from time to time — I think there's always been a certain overlap between HN and the writing community.
> Why not fix the problem?

Because doing so breaks backwards compatibility, simple as that.

The problem isn't even that `setenv` isn't thread save. The problem is that `getenv` returns a `*char` directly into the environment memory space. Many many many programs rely on that being the case.

> People like you

People like me would like every software to be perfect, but that's not the world we live in, so we are forced to be pragmatic. When fixing something causes more problems by breaking backwards compatibility promises, than it prevents, then there is no good argument for a fix, and the correct approach is to say "yes, this sucks, let's document it well so people don't waste too much time on this".

The setenv/getenv problem is such a case. Anyone who disagrees is free to fork glibc, implement whatever fix they think is adequate, and then try to compile the software packages found on a typical Linux server against the result.

> so the issue can be reproduced.

"Can be reproduced" and "is a common issue in production code" are not the same.

Fact is, almost all production programs that set envvars, do so once, very early in the process lifecycle, and then never again, and so are never affected by this.
I've heard the opposite about Brockman. What makes you so confident about this tech abilities?