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EvilCorp probably has unissued shares. A rising market cap thus gives them a lot of leverage to achieve their goals. They could pay employees, borrow against those shares, raise more capital with a secondary offering, etc.

Also, if EvilCorp is worth $10, I could just buy it and stop all the EvilActions.

That's a fair argument. And to be clear (because my original comment might read as negative), I do like hardcover a lot. It might not work sometimes, but I still use it to track all my reading, because the ui is charming, because it has a good, open api and because it's very clearly made by people who really like reading. Wishing you all the success you can get!

I stumbled upon hardcover when I was looking for a book info api and saw that goodreads discontinued theirs. Although it's pretty rough around the edges I've been using it extensively since then.

As far as I understand hardcover was really created because goodreads discontinued their api and the team at hardcover saw how many people relied on it for a myriad of different niche projects.

If hardcover was just a replacement for the goodreads platform, then I'd agree with you. But it's not. It's there for the api, with the platform around it intended as a way to ensure free access of the api for everyone. And from that pov choosing GraphQL makes a lot of sense imo. You can't anticipate all the cool and different things people might want to do with it, so they chose the most flexible api spec they could.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if a complete rails rewrite was the right choice. The App was slow and sluggish beforehand, with frequent ui glitches and it still has those same issues. Their dev blog claims significant performance increases, but as a user I haven't noticed a big difference. Sticking with next.js, but moving to a selfhosted instance and then iteratively working on performance improvements would've been (imho) the better way forward. I see no reason why next.js somehow fundamentally couldn't do what they're trying to do, but rails can. Especially with just 30k users (which tbc is a great achievement, just not impressive from a technical standpoint).

Very disappointing. I do not understand how people earnestly defend the successionist view as a good future, but I thought he might at least give some interesting arguments.

This talk isn't that. There are no substantive arguments for why we should embrace this future and his representation of the opposite side isn't in good faith either, instead he chose to present straw-man versions of them.

He concludes with "A successful succession offers [...] the best hope for a long-term future for humanity. How this can possibly be true when ai succession necessarily includes replacement eludes me. He does mention transhumanism on a slide, but it seems extremely unlikely that he's actually talking about that and the whole succession spiel is just unfortunate wording.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing this. Eventually it became overwhelming, but for a while it was (un)surprisingly engaging.

I know that having parents who cared about my education (and were in a position to actively participate in it) was a privilege and not a given, but where are the parents in this situation? Do we just accept that an 11 year-old watches squid game, has unrestricted access to chatgpt and does all their school work without any oversight at all? Clearly this kid is not receiving the guidance it needs. Or any guidance really.

https://brainmade.org is similar, but free.

I think o1 will keep them going for a while. You don’t need to be economical to keep investors interested as long as the tech progresses, and if their new test-time compute scaling holds true for another magnitude or two they can just crank up the processing time to impress people whenever they need to raise more money.

In addition, with the rollout of their realtime api we’re going to see a whole bunch of customer service focused products crop up, further demonstrating how this can generate value right now.

So I really don’t think they’re running out of steam at all.

> anyone with fair knowledge of LLMs and E/R should be able to devise it.

While this may be true, I think it overlooks a really important aspect. Current LLMs could be very useful in many workflows if someone does the grunt work of properly integrating it. That’s not necessarily complicated, but it is quite a bit of work.

I don’t think we’ll hit a capabilities wall anytime soon, but if we do, we’ll still have years of work to do, to properly make use of everything llms have to offer today.

I do, but only for things in my immediate area. Stuff like grocery shopping, haircuts, doctors appointments, etc. Those are all reachable on foot and I know how to get there, because I do it regularly. But the first few times I used gps to find it. Now I know the route.

But that doesn’t help me for anything beyond that radius and probably not even there, because those routes go through parks and other stuff, so the car routes would be different.

Yes, but it works with a vpn and the change in latency isn’t big enough to have a noticeable impact on usability.

I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map.

I could probably work with printed turn by turn instructions, but that’s about it.

And I think that probably comes close to what the other post had in mind with „cannot navigate“

Are you alright? This reads like it was written by someone actively experiencing psychosis or a manic episode.

Do you have a source for this? Dog attacks being more common than car accidents seems extremely unlikely to me, given how prevalent car accidents are.

I really wouldn't expect a cellphone ban for students to result in a significant rise of delayed treatment for injuries caused specifically by dog attacks. Even if dogs attacking students is such a common occurrence that it warrants consideration in this proposal (which I doubt), it's still a school. Teachers and other staff are around. Just have them call emergency services in case of injuries.

This might be too basic, but I found this blog post to be an incredible introduction to queues: https://encore.dev/blog/queueing

Does it work well on Linux now? I’ve been looking for a virtual desktop alternative for a while now, but last time I checked out alvr it still seemed quite unstable.

I find this framing to be extremely far away from the reality of any sales conversations I've been a part of. Flipping it like this is a rationalization that helps you sleep better, not some deep insight that the sales profession is great actually.

It means that OpenAIs public commitments to allocate resources for safety research do not track with what they actually do and people who were hired to work on safety (or in schulmans case choose to focus on safety) don't like it, so they leave.

Must've been a difficult decision with him being a cofounder and all, but afaik he's been the highest ranked safety minded person at openai. He says it's not because openai leadership isn't committed to safety, but I'm not sure I buy that. We've seen numerous safety people leave exactly because of that reason.

What makes this way more interesting to me though is how this announcement coincides with Brockmans sabbatical. Maybe there's nothing to it, but I find it more likely that things really aren't going well with sama.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out and if he actually returns next year or if this is just a soft quitting announcement.

Whoops, missed that. Thanks.

Yeah. It's really really hard to prevent actors from coming up with clever ways to circumvent the automatic checks. But that just means that apple needs to play the cat-and-mouse game. That's what they always say their cut is for, no?

Thanks for the recommendation. Looks interesting and is currently on sale on steam, so I bought it.

This is super cool. It's surprising to me that it took so long for someone to try this. It seems like such an obvious idea (in hindsight). But I guess that's easy to say now that someone came up with it. If this turns out to work well even for much larger models, then we might see loss functions that incorporate ever more specific performance metrics, conceivably even actual execution times on specific hardware.

> Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money.

That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.

So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.

In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy. In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.

Yeah, that's fair. That was just a shitty thing to do. I was more focusing on the creative development that Minecraft saw under Microsoft.

Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.

This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.

But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.

Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo. I thought they were out of their mind paying that much money for something that I didn't think had many opportunities left to grow.

But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.

Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.

Doesn't exist yet, but it seems like they are working on it. https://github.com/continuedev/continue/issues/917#issuecomm...

> Larry Finger, and fish, from his Quora profile.

The inclusion of the fish in the tagline made me smile. There’s an innocence to the sentence that captures the image really well.

> but we're a small outfit with a focus on personal development, intrinsic motivation, good climate, and low turnover.

This is cool and all, but company culture is a two way street. Presumably you have this focus because you expect that employees appreciate it and in return are happier, more resilient and ultimately more productive because of it. But you can’t have this with someone who misrepresented themselves from the moment they walked in.

Consider also how this looks for other employees. They were hired for a job, do it well and in return got a great employer who cares about their wellbeing. But if you keep this person on, then you devalue the effort everyone else puts in, because apparently you can just lie on your resume and get the same great treatment as everyone else without any consequences.

That sounds like a pretty awesome experience. Thanks for sharing.