skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here.

Wanting to offload heavy work to a background job is absolute as old of a best practice as exists in modern software engineering.

This is especially important for the kind of API and/or web development that a large number of people on this site are involved in. By offloading expensive work, you take that work out-of-band of the request that generated it, making that request faster and providing a far superior user experience.

Example: User sign-up where you want to send a verification email. Talking to a foreign API like Mailgun might be a 100 ms to multisecond (worst case scenario) operation — why make the user wait on that? Instead, send it to the background, and give them a tight < 100 ms sign up experience that's so fast that for all intents and purposes, it feels instant.
Plot twist: Maybe the Ai is turning them all against each other.
It doesn't and it is generally acknowledged that working conditions are a part of the pay that gets factored in when you do supply and demand. But the example from Ford where he did nothing to improve the working conditions, but made 5 usd/day the standard is also famous for a reason: double the pay and you get the kind of people who care primarily about money.
HN cheered on Elisabeth Holmes as well.
USB CD/DVD drives are cheap and available.
All the English Tutors chipped in to get one mansion between them.
No they were evil way before then .. they just were able to keep their rosy image for longer then should have been able to.
If they align with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at Microsoft, they wouldn't have to initiate from ground zero since Microsoft possesses complete rights to ChatGPT IP. They could simply create a variant of ChatGPT.

it's worth noting that Microsoft's supposed contribution of $13 Billion to OpenAI doesn't fully materialize in cash, a large portion of it is faceted as Azure credits.

this scenario might transform into the most cost-effective takeover for Microsoft, acquiring a corporation valued at $90 billion for a relatively trifling sum.
It makes more sense if you think of it as reacting to the people and their actions rather than their perceived tribe.
On what grounds exactly? They are still the owners
Don't you think they have trouble enough as it is?
Uninstall your extensions. If you do a side by side comparison of clean installs, they’ll feel similarly responsive - Firefox uses less memory but the Chrome team closed the gap somewhat over the last year. Safari is still noticeably faster and lighter than both but that’s only to be expected since they don’t have cross-platform complications.
Depends. It is not a single coherent ideology. Most anarchocapitalists regard property and property of ones own body to be sacred. That would disallow selling children as you cannot own them in the first place. They own themself.
I don't think AGI is on the table at all. But if it does get created, it doesn't matter whether or not it's created by hobbyists. It would be so valuable that it will end up owned and controlled by one of the big guys in the end, regardless.
I don't mean I know them personally, but they don't seem to be major names in the manner of (as you see down thread) the Google Founders bringing in Eric Schmidt.

They seem more like the sort of people you'd see running wikimedia.
Same board member wrote 1 month ago...

"In the future, once the robustness of our models will exceed some threshold, we will have wildly effective and dirt cheap AI therapy. Will lead to a radical improvement in people’s experience of life. One of the applications I’m most eagerly awaiting."
> these were post-Soviet, American-style "democratic" leaders

Before that USSR collapsed under Gorbachev. Why? They simply lost with their planned economy where nobody wants to take a risk. Because (1) it's not rewarding, (2) no individual has enough resources (3) to get thing moving they will have to convince a lot of bureaucrats who don't want to take a risk. They moved forward thanks to few exceptional people. But there wasn't as many willing to take a risk as in 'rotting' capitalism. Don't know why, but leaders didn't see Chinese way. Probably they were busy with internal rats fights and didn't see what's in it for them.

My idea is that there are two extremes. On left side people can be happy like yogs. But they don't produce anything or move forward. On the right side is pure capitalism. Which is inhuman. The optimum is somewhere in between. With good life quality and fast progress. What happens when resources are shared too much and life is good? You can see it in Germany today. 80% of Ukrainian refugees don't works and don't want to.
Not in a million years, they have wildly different skillsets, one is useful for startups while the other one for leading a tech behemoth.

Unrelated: rolepad.com looks real good, best of luck with that!
I had an interesting experience with this for Michael Jackson's "Speed Demon" music video. I watched our copy of Moonwalker countless times, but watching the video as an adult, I recognized a number of streets and the freeway, and I realized they filmed the road sequences in Portland, OR (my home town). And it suddenly made sense, as the stop-animation in the music video came from Will Vinton studios, based in the Portland area.
The thought did occur to me that we're watching all this unfold via language (on twitter)
I mean their statement all but smeared him in public.

It's hard to think of what they could have said that would have been worse than what they did.
I wonder what their employment contracts state? Are they allowed to work for vendors or clients?
> I have a pet theory about the "AI revolution" or AGI that keeps getting relentlessly confirmed as events unfold: Microsoft sees a massive financial upside to this technology that no one else sees and this is being kept under wraps.

If AGI is "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work", I am Microsoft and have AGI, and other businesses do not, I am putting it charge of a Windows VM in Azure and offering it to companies to run aspects of their businesses. Why stop at "GPTs" if I can offer you specialized Clippys?

Put all your data in Microsoft 365, let Clippy do its thing, and you're saving a lot of money on not supporting people. Microsoft gets their cut, and you get to fire your employees. Win-win.
yes, the safety of their power/business/bank account. despite claiming otherwise something along the lines of "The Greater Good" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUpbOliTHJY
Please don't accuse people of lying on HN without evidence, it lowers the quality of the discussion.

I've flagged your comment for this reason.
Voice cloning from just 10 seconds of speech
App allows to clone the voice with just 10 seconds of speech. after creating a voice profile, you can either synthesise from text or convert your own speech into a target voice.
I am pretty familiar with the accident. The speed limit is not irrelevant; the question should not be "did the car behave as a perfect human driver would have?"

It should be "was the eventual outcome better than what a human driver would have achieved in the same situation?"

It's not actually clear that a human driver would have done better, and given that the human driver in this incident did a hit-and-run and still hasn't been caught, assuming that is... questionable.

The safety record of these cars is actually quite good when you consider the environment and times of day they operate in.
That's actually very important and why it exists: It ensures a way to settle debts. "Oh don't be ridiculous" has very little weight in money and debts disputes.

In the case you mention this is called "defence of tender before claim". It means the person offered to the money but that was refused, so they go and pay it into court to protect themselves. In effect it means that if someone offers to settle in legal tender and is refused, then follow that legal procedure, then the creditor cannot do anything anymore expect recovering the money from the court.
Is there no concern from you or people that share this idea about this technology falling into the arms of state actors that won't be so moral about it? You all have seemingly had an issue with money being made, but it falling into state actor hands means lives could be lost. That seems like a much bigger deal than someone making money.
HN is getting unresponsive because of all the "AI" conspiracy theorists.

Please leave some CPU cycles for the more interesting posts :)
Convenience instead of historical baggage, maybe?
I had this in a recent python project I joined. Dicts everywhere.

APIs kept breaking, nobody knew what data was passed around, strings instead of ints etc.

Thanks, I hate it.
I'm not talking about cloud. I'm talking about businesses with 1-300 employees. Most of them I've seen use cloud for backups or a few services. Most business stuff is on prem. File storage is probably 50/50 on prem / SharePoint / Google Drive. In the hundreds of business I've worked with, I could count on my 2 hands the number of Linux server I've seen. Most of the stuff they're running doesn't even support Linux.
People working remotely for EU o travel there often?
this is the blogpost version of "could have been an email" :D thanks.
I went on a deep dive about David Hilbert a few years ago.
He did incredible work. Unfortunate that his death was heavily overshadowed by the war.

Hilbert's 6th isn't just a problem; it's a quest for the ultimate scientific Rosetta Stone. A century on, we're still decoding the universe's complex math, inching closer to a universal scientific language. It's a testament to the enduring power of a great question: to inspire and challenge across ages.
Altman must be pissed af, he help built so much stuff and now got fked in the arse by these doomers. He realize the fastest way to get back to parity is to join MS because they already own the source code and model weights and it’s Microsoft. Starting a new thing from scratch would not guarantee any type of success and would take many years. This is his best path.
Nadella isn’t getting his info from HN threads.
I can't see it in any other way.
is the type of wealth that makes land be worth more in some places than in others

this gets really difficult when consdiering that the same unit of wealth also prices food, AND gambling
Aren't we seeing the same thing in the US?

Many of our institutions are more held together by 'un-written social norms' and someone like Trump can just ignore them. Do laws even matter now? Just like in Rome, the positions of power do 'what they can get away with', not what any 'law' says they can do.

The US has had past 'coup' plots. Even going back to Washington. Really if Washington hadn't been such boy scout, true believer, would we even have a US Republic?

Basically, the US has been more fragile than we would like to acknowledge.
Ilya doesn't regret firing Sam, he regrets "harm to OpenAI". He didn't expect this level of backlash and the fact 90% of the company would leave. He has no choice but to backtrack to try and save OpenAI, even if he looks like an even bigger fool
!0 === true, but 1 !== true. I don't recall ever needing the strict comparison, but it seems to tickle the fancy of most js programmers.
All these fads prevent us from producing simple maintainable code.
We do that all the time, but in this case I'm not sure it's proper because the Ilya story is included in the article that's currently at #1, and the discussion is including both.
I've been using Safari on MacOS for the last 3-4 years (switching from Chrome), and I can't remember a single site that wouldn't work properly.

With one notable exception of Google Meet, which consistently tended to fail on anything but Chrome.
They basically started a brand new division of a company on a weekend. Impressive for a decades-old behemoth.
Suppose you are hired as a copywriter to write a blog post for my website about doggy daycare. You are tasked to write about "cold-weather workouts for dogs", but you have little to no knowledge about the subject. So you have to research. You open Google and search what existing articles come up related to this topic. You read them, write down interesting facts, and then propose an outline to the employee. Employee approves it and you write the article based on everything you've discovered. So we are on the same page, this workflow describes the absolute vast majority of copywriting jobs.

So that's basically what AIMD does. You enter the topic, it searches for interesting facts and citations, it analyzes the structure of articles that already rank well on the subject, and proposes an outline. You [the human] edit/approve the outline, and AIMD writes the article for you.
> They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. This was thrown out the window for no reason whatsoever.

This complaint about TLJ resonates the least with me, as a (super, at one time) fan from well before the prequels. The seeds of this later Luke and of the situation of the Jedi are there in the OT, and I’m not sure what else you do with hermit-Luke in the setting established for the new trilogy. Sticking with “he’s still a gung-ho hero” doesn’t break “routine” (Johnstone’s terminology) and wouldn’t be good storytelling, and the way in which the routine will be broken has already been hemmed in by choices in VII (he’s withdrawn from taking an active role in galactic politics). At least with this direction, there’s somewhere to go with the character, and conflict for his scenes that’s not a straight repeat of him and Yoda in Empire.
There are yuddite decels at whatever is left of the wheel, not happening.
There’s only 4 people on the board.
The real loser in this chaos is Microsoft.

Remember skype? Microsoft had to buy it twice to gain usable access to IP.
After Ballmer, competency can only be higher at Microsoft.
>I view this a final (and perhaps disparate) attempt from a sidelined chief scientist, Ilya, to prevent Microsoft from taking over the most prominent AI.

Why did Ilya sign the letter demanding the board resign or they'll go to Microsoft then?
> As for employees end masse acting publicly disloyal to their employer, usually not a good career move.

Wut?

This is software, not law. The industry is notorious for people jumping ship every couple of years.
I worked on healthcare software for over a decade. The healthcare industry attracts the lowest quality people generally. Software engineers aren't giving up working at FAANG to go work in healthcare. A significant portion of UHG's revenue comes from billing and other healthcare software. Most of it is under their Optum brand.
I've worked with a lot of non-profits, especially with the upper management. Based on this experience I am mostly convinced that people being motivated by a desire for making money results in far better outcomes/working environment/decision-making than people being motivated by ego, power, and social status, which is basically always what you eventually end up with in any non-profit.
>never honored their promise to bring their capabilities back

They did. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/23831094/firefox-android-...
It is a good story, but facts seems to indicate that essentially the rest of the board wanted Sam out before he was not keeping them in the loop for things they didn't want to hear. They got Ilya on their side.

Now they have got rid of Mira as well. Mira and Ilya and 500+ employees are threatening to quit if the board doesn't back down.

So it seems Ilya was not the main driver of the coup but essentially went along with it initially but changed his opinion after seeing what that would do, but the rest of the board were not willing to back down.
> Sam's independence is literally, currently, tanking the company?

Honestly, I think they did that to themselves.
> The problem with that is... humanity is doing a good enough job of messing things up without AGI.

Just imagine how much more efficient we could be in messing everything up if we had AGI, though!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gergovia
You know nothing about me or what I do when away: making shallow assumptions about what I/others should or shouldn't enjoy is rude.
> At least two members of the board probably were genuinely more concerned about AI alignment

Is there any evidence that Altman's firing was even related to AI alignment? All I've seen is people speculating about it.
None of these companies appease China; they refuse to provide service under those conditions and/or they are IP range blocked.

Microsoft does service China with Bing, for example.

You should not sell OpenAI's to China or to Microsoft.

Especially after a DDOS by Sue Don and a change in billing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
It's a bit scary that there are people who think they can align a super intelligence but couldn't forecast the outcome of their own actions 3 days into the future.
It looks like you accidentally a word (and intentionally editorialize the title).
OP should start by not letting their 4yo play video games.
Except Google is just moving money from right hand to left hand.

If Firefox wanted to be at the top, they have to pay cash to Google.
GP isn’t taking umbrage with the concept of needing to offload work to a background process.
> I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman.

Maybe it has to do with them wanting to get rich by selling their shares - my understanding is there was an ongoing process to get that happening [1].

If Altman is out of the picture, it looks like Microsoft will assimilate a lot of OpenAI into a separate organisation and OpenAI's shares might become worthless.

[1] https://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/openai-in-talks-to-s...
"Subsequently, we observed and documented 93 putative mating events in the attic of a Dutch church..."

The wonderful thing about language is that, even when speaking about the Netherlands, this is a sentence that has probably never occurred before.
I listened to a college professor talking about Neuromancer and he connected republican president Ronald Reagon's "Reaganomics" to the theme corporations were taking over the world.
That’s not really that dumb. The Death Star is powerful enough to blow up an Earth-sized mass of rock, but Yavin Prime is larger than Jupiter. If they could blow it up at all, it might have taken longer to do than just rounding the planet. Or, it might have been impossible to do safely at a range close enough to do it. Additionally, recharging the Death Star takes some time so even if destroying the gas giant was as fast as destroying Alderaan, the rebels might have gained enough time to flee.
The tweet is now obsolete as OpenAI employees are confirming the number is much higher now, atleast 650: https://twitter.com/lilianweng/status/1726634736943280270
I do hope that Ilya gets good support! I hope the same for Sam, all other employees. I’m worried that Ilya will get a lot of hate. (My allegiance is with Sam.) But I support general kindness and I feel sadness for all involved.
Depends on why they did what they did.

If they let msft "loot" all their IP then they lose any type of leverage they might still have, and if they did it due to some ideological reason I could see why they might prefer to choose a scorched earth policy.

Given that they refused to resign seems like they prefer to fight rather than give it to Sam Altman, which what the msft maneuver looks like defacto.
I'm consulting for a company with 5000 servers right now, and maybe a dozen run Linux. They've still got a few hundred Server 2008 boxes running with EoL licenses. We looked into migrating to Linux but it's not an option.
Well they all are, right? Not just MSFT, but also Nvidia, Google, etc.

They have the politicians in their pockets, they have the best talents, they have the computing power, they have pretty much infinite monetary credit granted by the banking union.

There is no limit.
My apologies - I don't really disagree with anything you're saying, but it's just not really relevant to the comment I was replying to (one in which the commenter apparently misunderstood the article).
Probably not accidentally, I'm guessing.
also killing old addons, i miss classic theme restorer, having to resort to keeping a git repo up to date in my appdata to style userchrome is so annoying
that tweet would be more at home on a linkedin page.
> Microsoft has full rights [1] to ChatGPT IP. They can just fork ChatGPT.

What? That's even better played by Microsoft so than I'd originally anticipated. Take the IP, starve the current incarnation of OpenAI of compute credits and roll out their own thing
The Fact still nobody knows why they did it is part of the problem now though. They have already clarified it was not for any financial reason, security reason, or privacy/safety reason, so that rules out all the important ones that spring to anyone’s minds. And they refuse to elaborate why in writing despite being asked to repeatedly.

Any reason good enough to fire him is good enough to share with the interim CEO and the rest of the company, if not the entire world. If they can’t even do that much, you can’t blame employees for losing faith in their leadership. They couldn’t even tell SAM ALTMAN why, and he was the one getting fired!
What are the pros? Even in Python, where such an approach is not unheard of, it sounds horrendous. Dataclasses and pydantic became popular for a reason.
Is Microsoft stuck giving OpenAI the $10B?

Or was it more of non-binding pledge?
You don't really need to pay of Windows nowadays as it can work indefinitely without Activation.
They should not have expected the OpenAI staff to follow Ilya after Sams exit. Sam’s policies are a lot more lucrative for the openAI staff. The staff is acting in their own interest as well
Satya must be creaming his pants 24/7 from this sudden windfall
it must have just slipped out
Hanlon's razor is never an excuse or defense. I have literally never seen it used that way. It is, as you say, a statement that the tiger is eating you because it's hungry.

I firmly believe that more understanding is always better than less. If you understand that the tiger is eating you because it's hungry, you at least have some chance of diverting its attention by offering an alternative, less feisty meal.

But covering your ears and eyes and shouting "it's an evil tiger that hates me!"... how is that in any way better than understanding objective reality? And why in the world would you attack someone for making the observation that the tiger is hungry rather than agreeing with factually incorrect claims about the tiger holding a personal vendetta?

It's bizarre, and IMO unhealthy.
Probably a violation of agreements with OpenAI and it would harm their own moat as well, while achieving very little in return.
Exactly, how are the researchers going to get all the compute power they need without the 'seller's selling something? Like it or not ChatGPT took the country by storm, has name recognition, generating revenue. And that all allows them to purchase more compute, hire more researchers. What do they think will happen if they stop selling? Will they work for free?
I believe people should be given second chances. There’s a good chance that the Elm debacle has taught most people involved a thing or two.
For all that went down in the last 48 hours...would not surprise me if post above was made by Ilya himself ... be right back...need more popcorn...