shon

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The good ole days ;)

In San Francisco, you can still find buildings where the elevators have ashtrays, though usually the actual tray is gone.

Yes! I remember. It was bad lol.

When I was a 20-something big-4 consultant traveling weeks on end for work, I took up smoking for exactly the reasons you suggest. I had nothing to do in my down time and knew nobody, but I could sit in hotel bar with a smoke and strangers would trail over.

Yep, I’m old enough to have been working when you could still smoke in hotel bars. In Monaco you could order a pack of Marlboro Reds at your dinner table back in 2006.

Stop reading HN and read the book now. You’re welcome. ;)

Hmm I had an ST. I think I vaguely remember this. Was it a PD game or commercial?

Thanks! working on multiplayer now...

The Gibson! Very cool. did you make this?

I made a Tron lightcycle game: https://new.af/tron

Now that AI accelerates dev so much, I suspect we'll get to see a lot of cool throwbacks.

+1 for explorers

Manus has been the best agent for turning text into work --useable slides, code, extracting data from websites, etc. that I've seen. There are better tools for specific cases like coding, but for one tool that could handle agentic workflows with minimal oversight and configuration, it's the best.

Hope Meta doesn't hose it.

Bummer. Manus was the best actual agent for my money. I literally have it working for me right now so I can goof off on HN… no joke.

I just bought this vintage magazine on eBay. It’s too good not to.

There are a few more out there if you want to thumb-through the deal thing

I honestly think that if you were to show the tech we have today, to someone at OpenAI back in 2015, they would say “we did it!!”

Outside of robotics / embodied AI, SOTA models have already achieved Sci-Fi level capability.

Such a great book… should be required reading for anyone managing engineers.

Interesting, I hadn’t see the Knowledge Navigator before. I would argue that we’re very close to the capabilities shown in that video.

Isn’t this already that? A new business model? Something like OpenAI’s search or Perplexity can run on its own index and not be influenced by Google’s ranking, ads, etc.

In areas where there is a simple objective truth, like finding the offset for the wheels on a 2008 BMW M3, we have had this capability for some time with Perplexity. The LLMs successfully cuts through the sea of SEO/SEM and forum nonsense and delivers the answer.

In areas where the truth is more subjective, like what is the best biscuit restaurant in downtown Nashville, the system could easily learn your preferences and deliver info suited to your biases.

In areas where “the science” is debated, the LLM can show both sides.

I think this is the beginning of the new model.

Complete with milkdrop and skins.. love it

Everything sounds like it's just a bunch of hackers

It is! This is run by George Hotz, aka geohot, aka the kid who cracked the iPhone SIM lock at 17yo, released the 1-click jailbreak for iOS before he was 20, and then went ahead and cracked the PS3 shortly after and released Sony’s private key (used to sign all PS3 software) for all the world to see.

He’s a beast. Now he’s doing Tinygrad and Comma. You won’t be seeing Corpo-speak from this guy or his team lol.

Cool to see him doing well and doing it his own way.

The article is short on details. If you want to see the actual jailbreak prompts check out Pliny on X:

https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1806446304010412227?s=46&...

The article mentions it briefly but Jan Leike, is talking: Reference: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494?s=46&t=pO4...

He clearly states why he left. He believes that OpenAI leadership is prioritizing shiny product releases over safety and that this is a mistake.

Even with the best intentions , it’s easy for a strong CEO like Altman to loose sight of more subtly important things like safety and optimize for growth and winning, eventually at all cost. Winning is a super-addictive feedback loop.

lol.. probably

No, my argument is that building an employee retention tool is not the same from an ethical perspective as building a weapon system.

One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon.

The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon.

And then there’s AdTech.. lol

Yeah!

Yep.. and grocery stores

Lololol

Sorry, I’m being a little dramatic.

I mean the data part is a little scary. Look up People Data Labs. There are lots of these data aggregators and that data can be used for a lot of scary things. HR in practice is probably the least scary.

Really? You think this is that bad?

I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)”

But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective.

Or ah hem… Palatir for example.

Typically these tools are bought and used by HR or Talent Acq departments, not managers so the type of detailed decision-making you’re describing wasn’t a use-case in my experience.

It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies .

From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.

Yes, actually. Hiring sucks. We wanted to make it better.

I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co).

We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.

Sold the company to Allegis.

It’s worse and deeper than you’d want to know. That said most HR Tech companies and large corporate HR departments are incompetent so it’s not really as scary in practice as it sounds.

Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…