skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it points out how Altman setup this non-profit OpenAI as a sort of humanitarian gift, because he pretty clearly marketed himself as having no financial stake in the company, only to use that as leverage for his own benefit.

This whole thing is a gigantic mess, but I think it still leaves Altman in the center and as the cause of it all. He used OpenAI to gather talent and boost his "I'm for humanity" profile while dangling the money carrot in front of his employees and doing everything he could to get back in the money making game using this new profile.

In other words, it seems like he setup the non-profit OpenAI as a sort of Trojan horse to launch himself to the top of the AI players.
Former OpenAI Employees Allege "Deceit and Manipulation" by Sam Altman
Here’s an actual study about the effects of screen time (TV) on childhood development:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/baby-...
By the looks of it, Argentinians didn't want to continue with the current system nor wanted the status quo offered by other parties. The elected president will either rock or bust.
NHL Comes Around to Digital Collectibles, Using Sweet Platform
I can run in QWOP, ask me anything.
Human biodiversity is an empirical fact. Are some populations taller than other, on average? Is red hair more prevalent in certain populations? Pretty much nobody actually rejects the idea of human biodiversity.

The neo reactionary types tend to draw specific conclusions from the idea of human biodiversity, like that racial disparities in IQ are inherent and not environmental. That's a conclusion I don't think is in line with Scott's views.

Furthermore, I suggest you read the linked emails in more detail. He likes the emphasis reactionaries put on social class, and dislikes
... pretty much everything else. He explicitly states that becoming a reactionary is stupid - I'm not sure how that's meant to be read as sympathetic.

This is another case where praising even a small component of a particular movement, even when paired with explicit condemnation of the movement as a whole, is taken as an endorsement.
That’s one expensive template engine…
The US seems extremely devoid of individual freedoms compared to most other countries.
But it literally is
No you don't normally elect people to boards
She literally wanted to destroy OpenAI in order to save it. Unbelievable. We need a total and complete shutdown of EAs serving on startup boards until we figure out what the hell is going on.
Uhm nope , atleast not the one on playstore , is it there somewhere in the settings ?
> It simply helps slow down the most advanced current effort

If she believes that the most advanced current effort is heading in the wrong direction, then slowing it down is helpful. "Most advanced" isn't the same as "safest".

> and potentially let a different effort take the lead

Sure but her job isn't to worry about other efforts, it's to worry about whether OpenAI (the non-profit) is developing AGI that is safe (and not whether OpenAI LLC, the for-profit company, makes any money).
Bias warning: I created CodeApprove to give GitHub reviews a better UI.

GitHub PR review UI is … fine. But it has very little depth. Unlike an IDE it’s hard to grow into a power user of it. It seems to be optimized for simple reviews with 1-2 rounds of a few comments each.

When you do dozens of code reviews every week you want something more. You want something snappy and dense with keyboard shortcuts. You want something that draws your attention to where it’s needed and something that helps you ensure all your conversations reach resolution.

So there’s a lot of room for improvement and GitHub hasn’t shown much interest in improving this area. So 3p UIs are stepping in (Graphite, CodeApprove, Reviewable, etc)
I first read about this trick in a Heinlein novel, and it involved shipping logs if I recall correctly. Luckily I caught it early in my career - leave in an easy mistake that is trivial to fix and harms nothing. It 100% works. The nitpicker feels like they won and you don’t waste time watching them spend hours pouring over everything.
I mean it seems like the conversation these days is never about how Bitcoin was a libertarian anti-corruption response to the 2008 banking crisis. The miracle then is hoping enough people stop trusting banks. I feel like institutional money getting into crypto was the thing that killed it. A cheap investment to maintain control of the value of a dollar.
Conflicts of interest suck. Experienced board members avoid them or deal with them. They don't allow their conflicts of interest to spiral out of control to the point that they destroy the thing they're supposed to govern.
Of course they can. If Sam Altman is really as heedless about AI safety as the board seems to think, GTP wouldn't be so aggressively aligned.
> Doesn’t this sound like Toner herself is playing god? That is, only she is the gatekeeper of humanity and only she knows what is good for the entire humanity

Not sure why you’re singling her out - all execs of massive tech companies think exactly the same.

A handful of execs have decided that AI is what humanity needs and they’ve spent the last year shoehorning it into every product possible, giving the consumer no choice but to use it. I even discovered it in a journaling app - AI rated my response to the journaling prompt, completely defeating the purpose.
Another thread of intellectual history: the EA people who tend to speak most loudly about AI safety (two of them are on OpenAI's board) owe much to the writings of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit, leading quickly back to GE Moore; the engineers owe a lot to Turing, and the computational linguists to Chomsky. You can quickly go through Turing and Chomsky to GE Moore's classmate and friend Bertrand Russell. It's like six degrees of Russell and Moore. Or six degrees of Sidgwick and Frege if you want to go back a little further. And so on...
Is Sam a member of her faculty? Or an advisor?

Otherwise I'm not sure what changes would be "appropriate" for him to direct.
> they had included bluetooth & app control.

They’ve already done something similar to that to toilets, not completely though; got it to remote control and batteries yet. I guess wifi and cloud subscription would be next.
The "service such as CloudFlare" is CloudFlare, I just hit their CAPTCHA thing, and after checking "I am a human" 3 separate times I got through.
but epigenetics usually stores information over much shorter timescales than generations. For example, cellular identity is stored epigenetically - whether a cell is a neuron or a white blood cell.
Oooh yes , found it in the settings
That seems reasonable? The charter of the company could reasonably be furthered even if that means the end of the organization. If at some point the existence of the organization becomes antithetical to the charter, the board members have a responsibility to destroy it.
Tiger Global's Scott Shleifer Steps Down as Head of Private Investing
Actually you can’t comment on lines that haven’t been changed if they’re too far from the changed lines! It’s a weird limitation of GitHubs data model.

(source: that’s one of the features that people like most about the review tool I created, CodeApprove)
It's not unhinged, it's explicitly within the scope of OpenAI's charter. Sam Altman himself said that "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." not even a year before OpenAI was founded: https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
Piquant works in English too. Just rarely used and so that wont help in most circumstances.
Practically all of the most relevant experts in this domain, leadership in OpenAI, think it's right around the corner.

> Assuming it can be done weaponization of this tech would change the balance of power in the world dramatically.

Yes it would, but it wouldn't be as bad as everyone dying.

> Everybody seems to be worried about the wrong thing: whether or not the AGI will be friendly to us. That doesn't really matter, what matters is who controls it.

No, "who controls it" is a problem best tackled after "will it kill everyone." You say "That doesn't really matter," but again, Sam Altman himself thinks "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
This is insane. "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board".

First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense.

Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity).

Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea.
Good point! Excuse me for interjecting here, but is it possible that you yourself are in a bubble of sorts?
Yesterday [0] I thought it likely some Twitter lawyer would have talked him out of anything foolish and Musk would be busy finding excuses/rationalizations for not going through with it. I was wrong... but it'll still be fun to watch with popcorn.

I'd also like to highlight funny tweets (mirror link for convenience [1]) that someone mentioned in the Techdirt-article comments. The Tweet-author is explaining the dumb-ness of Musk's lawsuit in, er, amusingly simple language:

> With that in mind, here is my lawsplainer thread on Musk v. Media Matters, et al., using only the ten hundred words people use most often.

> Elon Musk asked the people who have the power to decide right and wrong to make Media Matters pay him because he said they hurt him. Almost everything about his asking is stupid and wrong. It is so stupid and wrong that his entire asking is broken. I will start with the people he is asking, and the place he is asking it in. [...]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38324114

[1] https://nitter.net/KathrynTewson/status/1727002256149770483
OpenAI does not have an advisory board. She is on the board of directors and has fiduciary responsibilities. It does not matter that the parent organization is a non-profit. The duty remains.
Which open AI would you suggest the layman use?
> I think OpenAI should have prioritized character more in its hiring.

I think OpenAI should have prioritized sanity more in its board member selection.
L Reuteri supplements made the biggest difference for me after about 3 months.
GenAI and NLP AI – Build products, apps and code using story before you code
Accessibility options can help a bit, but aren't implemented widely and aren't anywhere near as powerful as cheat codes and console commands. Being able to move between stages, spawn or remove objects and characters, or even just get your character unstuck can let you work around what would otherwise be game breaking bugs and provide many hours of entertainment.
Secretaries were part of academia (something that came with his professor job). What is unique to Knuth is not the existence of a secretary, but his (attempted) refusal to receive emails except about bugs (but those he gets thousands of, as everyone in the world is encouraged to report bugs to him about every page he has ever written).

Anyway, Knuth's secretary (shared with several other faculty members) retired from Stanford several years ago (he dedicated one of his books to her), and although he hasn't updated the page, in fact he does all his own email now. (There is someone who comes in once a week to send his replies in the post — if you email Knuth about a bug you may get a reply a few months later from this person, asking for your postal address to mail you the reply: this will be a printout of your email, with Knuth's reply in pencil… and an enclosed cheque if your report/suggestion was accepted.)
It is a complaint, or a discussion of the need for caution?
Wow! We had a random conversation at work a couple of years ago and my boss mentioned some other old "chat bot", and suddenly my Doctor Sbaitso memory came rushing back. Along with lots of memories of trying to pick my soundcard in DOS games.
You are missing some context. The context is apparently 'Humanity' and humanity didn't elect Helen Toner.
YouTube says it's not slowing down Firefox – just ad blockers
Addressing complaints that YouTube videos are taking extra long to load on Firefox, YouTube says it’s down to its efforts to keep the ads flowing.
Frankly that's an irrelevant first order thinking.

If Sam would let it go what would happen? Nothing. Criticism and comparisions already exist and will exist. Having it coming from board member at least gives counter argument that they're well aware of potential problems and there is opportunity to address gaps if they are confirmed.

If regulators find argument in the paper reasonable and that's going to have impact - what's wrong with that? It just means argument was true and should be addressed.

They don't need to worry about commercial side because money is being pured more than enough.

The nature of safety research is critical by definition. You can't expect to have research constrained to talk only in positive terms.

Both sides should have worried less and carry on.
LLMs don't retrieve anything unless there's infra in place so that they can go and do that. It's called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and it's still pretty new enough that it hasn't been integrated in all workflows. There was a bunch of copy early on claiming LLMs "read the internet and find you results" but it's weaselly wording and was until remarkably recently complete BS.
can bard be an adblocker on chrome?
Is that worse than people who defraud and steal from users and hold entire companies hostage for their own motives?

In EA, the ends always justify the means, so that includes doing any or all of the things you mention if it achieves some ideological goal.
1. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/central-line-temperature-lon...

tl;dr: when the underground was built, it was very cold down there (14C) to the point where people would go visit the underground in summer just to cool down. So no thought was build in the extra ventilation tunneling for future cooling it since it was already so damn cool.

But over the 100 years since then the trains and people have heated up the tunnels and stations, and since underneath London it's clay, it works as insulation so the heat never manages to dissipate, but rather gets trapped.

There are projects to add cooling to stations, but since they're old, deep, cramped and built in a dense metropolis that is already full of other stuff both above and underground, it is difficult and expensive to do.
Plenty of safety critical PID controllers out there though...
Emmett Shear (OpenAI interim CEO): "Most CEO jobs are automatable."
Hardware vendors are known to swap to cheaper lower performance hardware after reviews are out which in my eyes is fraud, whether or not the law agrees is a different story.
I can't count the number of times I've been asked to relicense a piece of GPL software I maintain because users think it's "fair use" of the original source I built it from.

Sorry, even if I agree with you, the lawyers for the owners that have proven to be litigious in the past aren't going to stop and consider that line of thought when it's up to a judge and/or jury to decide that and I can't afford the legal bill.
Yeah I'd imagine that's the best way. Lots of LLMs can generate workable Python code too, so code that jives with Blender's Python API doesn't seem like too much of a leap.

The only trick is that there has to be enough Blender Python code to train the LLM on.
SK Hynix is the #3 flash manufacturer (acquired Intel's NAND biz), and their RAM is quite decent. i wouldn't think twice about buying if it wasn't for this report.
20 Days in Mariupol (full documentary) [video]
Will I consider Sam Altman a grifter by the end of 2026?
For about 20 years in there, we called that process gentrification and it was specifically led by ambituois young professionals (like those on HN) who bought into traditionally ethnic and/or ailing neighborhoods and filled them with cronut shops and ukelele performance centers (or boot stores and gastropubs).

But as you note, that movement petered out and more and more money came in and now those same neighborhoods are inaccessible to the same kind of people that first gentrified them.

Except that, as many predicted as gentrification became rampant, it's not really sustainable to drive all the service workers and their families out of the city center, and so now they just live on the streets outside of the cronut shops and gastropubs.

So if you give it another 10 or 20 years though, you can expect another urban flight to manifest and balance things out a little more again.
Very helpful and I didn’t realize you could share like that
it doesn't seem like much more of an abstraction than an abstract numeric symbol equalling a certain number of physical objects (ie 3 = * * * )

in my limited experience basic variable use isn't much of a stretch for a 3yo
Continuing to charge for access to something that costs you nothing to maintain.

Like a piece of software that could go un-updated if the user wished.
Yeah. China is weirdly regulated with no standard.

One misstep and you wish you could be prosecuted in US instead.
Who, it's worth mentioning, got a seat because Open Philanthropy donated $30 million to OpenAI early in its creation.
At a certain level you can't guarantee the outcome of calculations will be 1:1. For example python and node both perform floating point calculations differently, so "identical" simulations will drift apart over time.
She was working with the Pentagon, to try and make sure there isn't a serious issue between the US & China on AI, which requires actual engagement instead of just blind nationalism if you want the Chinese to listen to anything you have to say. I think it would be a really bad idea to assume that she just hasn't thought this through. We just don't have enough information.
For 1. There was a full writeup posted on HN about this a year or two ago. The answer is pretty much that the tube is far deeper than any other competing system and also is below things that can't be disturbed for ventilation shafts.

It's getting like 1-2 degrees hotter each year
Ironically, gpt4 is happy to write that story. Not the greatest thing, but I enjoyed the concept of a Victorian inventor teaching his AI based on Jane Austen and Brönte sisters texts.
Oh that’s interesting to hear. I do that too :D

Which emulator do you use or did you write your own ?
that is just... incredible. the intonation, the response.
Git 2.43.0 Released
> the Netflix version of this will be better than the real thing.

On that note, Ilya's about-face is easily explained by him being suddenly "recruited" into the Traveller program over the weekend and begging for Sam to return because Altman's leadership of Open AI seeds the beginning of what will one day become The Director.

The mission comes first.
For anyone who is familiar with Obelix but has no idea who Idefix is, it's the original French name for Obelix' dog, Dogmatix. Idefix is a pun on the French expression idée fixe (fixed idea) meaning an obsession.
> "They had to fire Sam, because he was trying to take over the board".

I mean, yes? The board is explicitly there to replace the CEO if necessary. If the CEO stuffs the board full of their allies, it can no longer do that.

> First: most boards are accountable to something other than themselves. For the exact reason that it pre-empts that type of nonsense.

Boards of for-profits are accountable to shareholders because corporations with shareholders exist for the benefit of (among others) shareholders. Non-profit corporations exist to further their mission, and are accountable to the IRS in this regard.

> Second: the anti-Sam Altman argument seems to be "let's shut the company down, because that will stop AGI from being invented". Which is blatant nonsense; nothing they do will stop anyone else. (with the minimal exception that the drama they have incepted might make this holiday week a complete loss for productivity).

No, the argument is that Sam Altman trying to bump off a board member on an incredibly flimsy pretext would be an obvious attempt at seizing power.

> Third: in general, "publishing scholarly articles claiming the company is bad" is a good reason to remove someone from the board of a company. Some vague (and the fact that nobody will own up to anything publicly proves it is vague) ideological battle isn't a good enough rationale for the exception to a rule that suggests that her leaving the board soon would be a good idea.

This might be true w.r.t. for-profit boards (though not obviously so in every case), but seems nonsensical with non-profits. (Also, the article did not reductively claim "the company is bad".)
Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)
Oh for sure, that's why I put "successful" in scare quotes. As mentioned, FB checks pretty much every one of the "ethical collapse" boxes with a bolded checkmark.

That they've managed to be successful financially in spite of that fact (so far!) is pretty singular. That's a rare group. Not saying it's one to emulate, though, far from it.
On the playstation you would load the GG as a disc and then pop it open and load another disc, it felt like absolute hacker magic.
>Also there were claims starting in the 50s where planarians were taught a maze or to respond to certain stimuli and then fed to other planarians and that the trait would sometimes transfer as well

So superpowers were transferred when ate? Kirby devs were on to something.
I think we will find more examples countering our modern idea of discrete organisms separated across generations.

Consider again the glider translated across space time. Is it the same glider after 1,2,10 generations in time?

I always found it curious the ancient archons had rulerships which kept continuity in nominative identity across individuals for several generations. The social practice continues with the first, the second, III, IV etc.

The epigenetic view supports it.
I would expect the world's second largest DRAM manufacturer to have trustworthy memory products.
> I was offered board seats twice but refused on account of me not having sufficient experience in such matters and besides I don't think I have the right temperament.

Yes, know thyself. I've turned down offers that seemed lucrative or just cooperative, and otherwise without risk - boards, etc. They would have been fine if everything went smoothly, but people naturally don't anticipate over-the-horizon risk and if any stuff hit a fan I would not have been able to fulfill my responsibilities, and others would get materially hurt - the most awful, painful, humiliating trap to be in. Only need one experience to learn that lesson.

> People that grow up insulated from the consequences of their actions can do very dumb stuff and expect to get away with it because that's how they've lived all of their lives.

I don't think you need to grow up that way. Look at the uber-powerful who have been been in that position or a few years.

Honestly, I'm not sure I buy the idea that's a prevelant case, the people who grow up that way. People generally leave the nest and learn. Most of the world's higher-level leaders (let's say, successful CEOs and up) grew up in stability and relative wealth. Of course, that doesn't mean their parents didn't teach them about consequences, but how could we really know that about someone?
It’s way above my pay grade to be able to afford to live there