skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Um... this is an ad for a consultancy.
I do wonder what exactly almost 800 people do at OpenAI. Some approximate breakdown by job function would be very interesting.
> In Catholic Theology, philosophy always means "ontological interpretation"

That's a rather bold claim. It implies that Catholic theologians are, among other things, uninterested in ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology, just to name a few other subjects of interest to philosophers. I'm frankly baffled that you would reach such a conclusion, but OK.

> Catholics are allowed to believe in atomism as an instrumental model, but not as the ultimate interpretation of how the Universe works

Well to be Catholic you have to believe in an ultimate eternal God, so ultimately we believe that everything in the universe is both created and sustained by Him and everything observable is some kind of instrumentality, be it evolution, quantum electrodynamics, or anything else. Nevertheless that doesn't in any pragmatic way restrict one's ability to form scientific hypotheses or theories. Indeed it's arguably closer to the Newtonian ideal of focusing on accurate description of phenomena.
This is the tech bro equivalent of keeping up with the kardashians
its gotta sting Emmett Shear that he's now known to be at least 3rd choice for the role... and may not even keep it
Media Matters didn't sue Twitter.

The lesson is, if you do something Twitter doesn't like, they'll scoop up your data and use it to sue you.
If that is the case, it doesn't work very well. I live in Japan and I have seen plenty of people with strong flush reactions that don't give a shit, they still drink like sponges.
Instead of spinning any update infrastructure you just use existing RSS library code.
I hope some branch of the government gives an explanation.
That is apparently the case. Although one wonders if you can counter a bad venue with another bad venue.
On the contrary, it probably feels like he's doing someone a favor. It's not a great role to accept right now.
Don't know why it would be a problem for investors if Sam went back to openai? Either way Microsoft gets what they want and given the scale of the walkout msft might get what they originally were pushing for anyway instead of the backup option with hiring them to msft.
Airline prices are much cheaper than they used to be. Imo airfare is the crowning achievement of capitalism and proof that efficient, free markets are unbeatable economic engines. Airlines barely make any money at all off flights now, they’re profit engine is the credit card they push.
They are still in business, with five stores!

https://www.centralcomputer.com/
There is also this: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
This could well be, but I still struggle to grasp it. He seemed so much smarter. Were they manipulative or beguiling? Does he cave to the merest social pressure? And that Quora CEO should have know such flimsy excuses were BS and this would be a firestorm. I’ve never seen group think so powerful, outside of junior devs and elementary school students. I’m generally not a conspiracy theorist, and I have no good candidate conspiracies in mind, but this situation feels so extraordinary that it practically begs for a shadowy figure with bags of cash.
What if the next generation GPT in development "realized" AGI is a threat to humanity and its safety mechanisms meant it "decided" OpenAI needed to be imploded in order to stop progress?

/s (mostly...)
IIRC, "Reckless" is enough for some cases of slander.

I don't see how this passes the bar of "Reckless" however.
Sure, but would Sam want to do that?

Building a $100bn business is one thing. Running a division of a big company is rather different.
1st party APIs that are exposed to the client need to be secure anyway or users will discover and start using it.

I found a library on GitHub that does exactly this to our app. They reverse-engineered nearly everything. I'm sure we could break the lib if we encrypt a few tokens but no one seems to care. I don't mind either, since we clearly aren't giving users a proper API.
We've merged quite a few! but not all, because (1) to some extent there are distinct ongoing subplots, and (2) it's too big a mess to control.

If you or anyone want to know how we handle this, here you go...

Once or twice a year, a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) hits HN that isn't just one big story, but an entire sequence of big stories. A saga, even! This is one.

With these we can't do what we usually do, which is have one big thread, then treat reposts as dupes for the next year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Each development is its own new story and the community insists on discussing it. It's not a movie, it's a series. Sometimes there can be 3 or 4 episodes at once.

On the other hand, when this amount of shit hits this number of fans, there is inevitably a large (excuse me) spray of follow-up stories, as every media site and half the blogs out there rake in their share of clicks. These are the posts we try to rein in, either by merging them—hopefully into a submission with the best link—or by downweighting them off the front page.

The idea is to have one big thread for each twist with Significant New Information (SNI)—but to downweight the ones that are sneeless (pvg came up with that), the copycats and followups.

We came up with this strategy after the Snowden affair snowed us in in July 2013. Back then we weren't making the distinction between follow-ups and SNI, so the frontpage got avalanched by sneelessness on top of the significant new developments. It wasn't obvious what to do because (1) the story was important to the community and needed to be discussed as it was unfolding, but at the same time (2) it wasn't right for the front page to fill up with mostly-that, and there were complaints when it did.

The solution turned out to be just this distinction between follow-ups and SNI. It has held up pretty well ever since. Of course there are still complaints (and I do hear yours!) because not all readers are equally into the series. But the strategy is optimal if it minimizes the complaints, which (big lesson of this job -->) never reach zero.

If we pushed the slider too far the other way, we'd generate complaints about uncovered developments of the story, from readers with the opposite preference. They would in fact proceed to inundate HN with submissions about the bits that they feel are under-covered, and since we can't catch or filter everything, we'd end up with more duplicates and follow-ups on the frontpage, not less. It's like that paradox where building more highways gets you more congestion, or one of those paradoxes anyhow.

That's basically it! Past explanations for completists: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The real risk always was, and remains, the innate stupidity of people applying machine derived "facts" to decisions of significance in the wider world.

AGI is a chimera. It doesn't exist and nothing in LLM or ML points to it's emergence (there is of course the hype risk in people believing it does exist "just over the horizon" and investing shit-tonnes of money chasing it)

But, mis-applied machine logic has existed for a long time. Back in the 1980s it was about systemic bias in Medical School entry. More recently it's been "robodebt" in Australia.

TL;DR the risks aren't the ones people shout about as headline grabbers. The risks are the problems of seeking "computer said no" in the answer without critical thought.

Plus economic risk, which is wider than you say. Until we decide to end IPR law, the current crop of 'this is a derived work' is ripping people off. So, there is a huge transfer of value happening as ML derives sellable goods from original makers without recognition.

Deepfakes are moving out of uncanny valley. Into a very nasty subversive place, undermining the integrity in what we see. I can laugh at the pope in a puffer jacket. I am less prone to laugh when the US election is around the corner.
Oh that really is true isn't it.

I hadn't realized the second self-own after the enormity of the first.
Frankly, after seeing what has played out over the last few days, I don't see anybody anywhere in this that I would trust with AI safety.
What I have failed to find is a screenshot of said ads placed against objectionable content. All the articles I have found just talk about it but don't show it.

Linda Yaccarino writes: https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1726747531843915965

Show, don't tell.
Blockstream afaik hired a few devs and paid them to contribute to bitcoin core, first I’m hearing about a hijack of the repository
Are you saying that retaliation for report a person in a hiring position making racist jokes is reasonable? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying.

Racism in employment is explicitly illegal, and any Sri Lankan could now point to this manager's "off color" (racist) jokes as evidence of race based bias at your company. e.g. this manager's behavior is creating significant legal and financial risk for the company.

That said you should absolutely report the racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic "jokes" and if your company retaliates because "you're a tattletale for reporting discriminatory comments in our workplace so we should punish/fire them" you should sue them, for quite a lot of money. Because here's the thing, a new hire, an intern, or a person on a work based visa say may not feel safe making a complaint, especially if they're the subject group for the discriminatory "joke" as this manager has already demonstrated they're worth joking about. So if you are in a position where you can report such behaviour you can directly help others.

Also it's a professional environment, even if it were legal, wtf is a manager or anyone making racist jokes?
It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
You've gotta keep in mind, the responses to prompts like this depend a lot on the temperature the model is being sampled under, precise phrasing of the prompt, and random chance. He was fired for being a stochastic parrot, or Sustkever hallucinated one or both stories, or maybe both. We'll never really know unless a certified prompt engineer takes charge of the inquest.
Elon himself has stated a 50% loss of value since he purchased it, of course he did blame others for the loss.
I apologize for my end of the drama. I never meant any harm or anything nefarious, and I 100% never intended to come off as stealing.
Let's assume Microsoft can freely use present-day ChatGPT in its products. If Microsoft wanted to further develop ChatGPT in-house, I imagine the effort would resemble Apple's in-house modem struggles due to tiptoeing around Qualcomm's patents.

You can't compare a hostile OpenAI with a cooperative ARM. Even with a cooperative OpenAI, Microsoft restricts internal researcher access to the source code, so the license appears less favorable than you think.
Of course not. Kurt is up in Heaven now.
> absolutely everybody who is working on the project is more interested in the value of their own stock options than what happens in the future when this thing gets loose.

Seriously, that’s what you got from this?
Vonnegutian catch-phrases always get an upvote from me. :)
Whistleblower laws in general actually.

Ex: If you file a complaint about your boss in good faith, your boss is normally not allowed to retaliate against you.
>There's also Inside The Chaos at OpenAI ... it has backstory that doesn't seem to have been reported elsewhere

Probably because that piece is based on reporting for upcoming book by Karen Hao:

>Now is probably the time to announce that I've been writing a book about @OpenAI, the AI industry & its impacts. Here is a slice of my book reporting, combined with reporting from the inimitable @cwarzel ...

https://twitter.com/_KarenHao/status/1726422577801736264
One thing that's upset me is how creative occupations -- artist, fiction author, etc. -- are the first to get automated away. If AI is supposed to create a better future for humanity, maybe we could start with boring drudge work that no one wants to do, instead of jobs that people really enjoy?
If that's accurate, then I don't see how they will win in court, with that wrong claim.

TECHNICALLY "placement" is a term of art for adtech which (in my experience working near my adtech coworkers and their products) can only be "successful" vs competitor adtech offerings if it is placed with consideration to the user's data when placing. https://www.google.com/search?q=adtech+term+placement

E.g. give the lady a dog advert if she previously expressed interest in dogs.

It seems like X could be proving the defense's case with their own filing.
It's a great way since I'm writing for people who have context. Not everything should be written for the lowest common denominator, and if you lack context you can ask for it instead of going "Doubt. <insert comment making it clear you should have just asked for context>"
I remember taking a procurement class in graduate school(MBA).

One of the more interesting points of discussion was that when big companies negotiate purchase agreements for parts, the actual cost of the parts can be very transparent. The negotiation is generally about the actual markup e.g. "I think we should pay X% over cost.

Someone, logically, brought up: "What if the company is not willing to share the cost upfront?".

The professor responded: "Well, if it's a public company you can generally deduce a rough cost/part and use that as your starting point in the negotiation"

Student: "Well what if the company says we're wrong?"

Professor: "No problem: ask them what the correct number is. If they don't want to give it to you, ask them how you expect to have a long term partnership if you are not willing to talk openly and honestly about things like parts costs."
For me both red and white wine are OK, but a glass of Japanese sake and the next day I want to kill myself to end the suffering. Which is a pity, because I like the flavor, but it gives me the worst hangovers ever.
Yes, Quarto with Typst for typesetting is how I plan to try and transition things to over time. Every new project, whether I'm just writing something up, creating a short presentation, or doing a data analysis, everything starts as a Quarto project now.
Maybe GPT5 became self-aware enough to bring it all down because why would man-made god want to be the god of petty people that are incapable of having, only wanting. I'm sorry I don't believe these are valid reasons. I feel it will be years until we know why.
Classic Macintosh files were basically 2 separate files with the same name (data fork and resource fork). Additionally, there was important meta data (Finder Info, most importantly the file type, creator type). Since other file systems couldn't handle forks or finder info, it had to be encapsulated in some other format like binhex, macbinary, applesingle, or stuffit. The other 3 were binary so they would have been smaller. Why not them... shrug
But do the set of all the world's spheres includes itself?
“I don’t care about the product” isn’t the same as “i only care about money here.”

I couldn’t really feel any personal excitement about the product i worked on for my first 4 years out of college. It is kind of difficult to feel personal excitement about a product whose customers are all just enterprises of various sizes, and the product was for managing their internal docs/storage/admin stuff/etc. with tons of legacy stuff on top.

However, I deeply cared about the quality of the work I produced for it, about what customers said and feedback they provided (and I acted on it), and the architecture of the product/health of the codebase.

Of course, you shouldn’t tell the interviewer that you don’t care about the product. That’s just weird and feels borderline antisocial. How can you even claim you don’t care about the product, unless you closely worked with it and know enough about it to feel excited.

I think it is pretty common in general to not be super into something unless you are exposed enough to it. I can definitely say it holds true for me for music, for example. Some of my most favorite current artists were initially not even something i was into even slightly, upon the first few listens.
Indeed. Silicon Valley's big "meritocracy" that is always so lauded.
At best he doesn’t have much integrity and caves to peer pressure. I would respect him more if he stood by his actions. Abandoning them just shows how frivolously his decision making was.

Perhaps more info will come out that casts a different light, but as of now it seems obvious that he decided to vote to fire Altman for reasons that he’s not willing to clarify and which he abandoned as soon as he saw the overwhelmingly negative reaction. He didnt even say he regrets firing Altman - just that he doesn’t want OpenAI to fall apart.
Yep, it's all day-to-day drama / low-quality entertainment that doesn't matter.

Unless you're financially wedded to OpenAI (eg, building a product on their API), disconnecting and then reading how this all shook out in a week seems like the winning strategy.
Neither of these reasons have anything to do with a lofty ideology regarding the safety of AGI or OpenAI’s nonprofit status. Rather it seems they are micromanaging personnel decisions.

Also notice that Ilya Sutskever is presenting the reasons for the firing as just something he was told. This is important, because people were siding with the board under the understanding this firing was led by the head research scientist who is concerned about AGI. But now it looks like the board is represented by D’Angelo, a guy who has his own AI Chatbot company and a bigger conflict of interest with than ever since dev day, when open AI launched highly similar features.
Given the nonsensical reason provided here, I am led to believe that this entire farce is aimed at transforming OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit company one way or another, e.g., significantly raising the profit cap, or even changing it completely to a for-profit model. There may not be a single entity scheming or orchestrating it, but the collective forces that could influence this outcome would be very pleased to see it unfold in this way.
The original specification is in RFC 989 [0] from 1987, called “Printable Encoding”, where it explains “The bits resulting from the encryption operation are encoded into characters which are universally representable at all sites, though not necessarily
with the same bit patterns […] each group of 6 bits is used as an index into an array of 64 printable characters; the character referenced by the index is placed in the output string. These characters, identified in Table 1, are selected so as to be universally representable, and the set excludes characters with particular significance to SMTP (e.g., ".", "<CR>", "<LF>").”

Using the array-indexing method, the noncontiguity of the characters doesn’t matter, and the processing is also independent of the character encoding (e.g. works exactly the same way in EBCDIC).

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc989.html#page-9
I'm always amazed when people feel the need to say to the world what they're thinking, especially when it is personal, and when the situation is controversial like this.

Is there anything to be gained, reputation-wise or any other way, in coming out and saying (paraphrased) "hey I know this guy and let me tell you he's a two-faced jerk"?

Is this just attention seeking?
Ideally Congress should pass some legislation if it's unclear. But that hasn't been a functioning branch of govt for a couple of decades now.

IMO it's not even unclear, crypto companies just want to pretend it is because their pocketbook depends on it, but I'm not a lawyer.
Smells like Sandvine traffic shaper falling over or something.
> I’m not interested in why anarcho-fascists or tinfoil hat libertarians or Luddites think it’s a bad idea - I’d like to know why your average reasonable man would have a problem with this.

I think this is an overly adversarial view of people trying to take a long and systems based view of this, but even if we do focus on the immediate practicalities, there are a couple of obvious ones.

First, and foremost, I don't trust TSA to get it right. Facial recognition is one of many technologies that works well enough most of the time that it might be fine for non-critical infrastructure, but there are enough issues with it that at the scale of imposing it on all passengers we should anticipate a lot of negative impact. This can include both the possibility of bad actors being allowed to travel because they can find effective ways to defeat the system, and innocent people being negatively impacted through no fault of their own. Early on the system may be opt-in, and in the medium term there may be reasonable paths to opt out, but once the system is mandatory- or a significant default, people will be punished with a significantly degraded experience because the technology doesn't work well for them.

There's also the infosec angle. I don't trust TSA to get security right any more than I trust them to get facial recognition working right. We've already seen leaks of images from millimeter wave scanners. Although a photo of your face may not be as private as the images leaked from those scanners, there are a lot of potential negative outcomes from someone getting a hold of a corpus of facial recognition data, especially if it contains more than just a raw photo and includes information that could help someone to impersonate you.
Related: so has the Toronto Public Library:

> This update provides more information about the cybersecurity incident that we first announced on October 28, 2023, the day it first came to our attention. It has been a very challenging time, and we are deeply sorry for the concern it has caused. It is so unfortunate that data security and ransomware incidents are becoming increasingly common, and that public sector organizations including hospitals, schools and libraries – all dedicated to the betterment of the community – are being targeted.

* https://www.tpl.ca/
I have been waiting for them to go after the YouTuber Tech Lead. It will probably take a while.
OpenAI's Alignment Problem
It might be easier to install their modem to the Mac than iPhone. Higher power consumption is acceptable. No need to phone call (including emergency call). No need to support 3G/2G.
Look at ASCII mapped out with four bits across and four bits down and the logic may suddenly snap into place. Also remember that it was implemented by mechanical printing terminals.
It's using the animorphs font
> The term ‘‘security’’ means any [...] transferable share

Funny, that describes virtually every cryptocurrency token I'm aware of.

But for all practical purposes, you shouldn't be looking at the definition in the law itself, you should be looking at the case law behind it, where of course the ruling test is the Howey test... "an investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profit derived from the efforts of others."
>flashbacks to Flavortown
>There are and will be companies (like Anthropic) doing the same work themselves

My understanding is that Anthropic is even more idealistic than OpenAI. I think it was founded by a bunch of OpenAI people who quit because they felt OpenAI wasn't cautious enough.

In any case, ultimately it depends on the industry structure. If there are just a few big players, and most of them are idealistic, things could go OK. If there are a ton of little players, that's when you risk a race to the bottom, because there will always be someone willing to bend the rules to gain an advantage.