And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)
How incredibly unsurprising. This is why it is pointless to make moral stands as employees when you do not ultimately have power over the companies decisions. The only power you have is to quit.
I wonder how many will do so, and how many will simply accept Sam’s AI written rationalization as this own and keep collecting their obscene pay packages…
Psychopaths tend to be dumb (but not always), and the smartest researchers that actually care about getting humanity to AGI tend to be safety conscious.
This has been a huge talent advertisement for Anthropic. Their recruiting just got easier for the next 6 months.
And behind the quitting decision is very little safety net and usually substantial financial obligations keeping people handcuffed. Something has to give. The power employees had during covid was the way it should be, or something more closely approximating that.
Employees often have the power to oust the owner and take over the company; and more often than that have the power to have business grind to a halt. It does take a strong union and a culture of solidarity and sticking together of course, which I doubt we would find in a place like OpenAI.
It's perhaps too late in this case, but this is what unions are for. Sam Altman + a handful of scabs can't keep the lights on at OpenAI if a critical mass of engineers refuse to work until this decision is reversed (or, even better, not made at all, since the union would be part of that process).
The conclusion that we will abandon Spotify for individual artist discords is nonsense. Clearly Spotify should be enabling all of the community building and merchandising that artists want to do because that would help their margins and moat. But regardless of whether they do or do not, the vast bulk of the demand side, the listeners, are going to want à la cart unrestricted music. It’s the same thing we want for video, we are just not given it. Perhaps they should balkanize into fifteen different streaming services each with its own catalog and exclusives but that way lies the return of piracy.
You guys are a godsend to the python tooling world. I’ve been far more excited about the impact rust is having on the software world than that of AI, and your work is a big part of that. While I have not seen any real net productivity gains from AI in mine or my juniors work, I’ve definitely seen real gains from using your tooling!
In fact as Jetbrains has been spending years chasing various rabbits including AI, instead of substantially improving or fixing PyCharm, without you steadily replacing/repairing big chunks of Pycharms functionality I would be miserable. If it came down to it, we would happily pay a reasonable license fee to use your tools as long as they stayed free for non-commercial usage.
Ruff is incredible, replacing a mountain of tools and rules with a single extremely fast linter/formatter. Given that it is updated and improved frequently, I’m curious if you have tried it recently, and if so what pylint rules are you using that it doesn’t cover?
Agreed, the db migrations are usually the slowest part. Another way to speed this up substantially if you are using postgres and need your test database to be postgres too, is to create and maintain a template database for your tests. This database should have all migrations already run on it and be loaded with whatever general use fixtures you will need. You can then use the Django TEMPLATE setting https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/settings/#template and Django will clone that database when running your tests.
I absolutely love Fastmail. I moved off of Gmail years ago with zero regrets. Better UI, better apps, better company, and need I say better service? I still maintain and fetch from a Gmail account so it all just works seamlessly for receiving and sending Gmail, so you don’t have to give anything up either.
I moved from my own colocated 1U running Mailcow to Fastmail and don't regret it one bit. This was an interesting read, glad to see they think things through nice and carefully.
The only things I wish FM had are all software:
1. A takeout-style API to let me grab a complete snapshot once a week with one call
1. hoping to have a JMAP archive format at some point which should cover that. I'd hope that normally you'd be fetching a delta update rather than the whole thing. We've got enough bandwidth for a few people do to it, but I wouldn't want every customer pulling their entire archive every week of 99% the same immutable data; that would be kinda sucky.
2. yeah, I'd love that too - we're keen to integrate with everything else that people are using. We have a basic in-house IdP thing for our own staff to authenticate against our hosted services, but haven't scaled it out. This will happen eventually, though I've been burned enough times I don't want to promise a timeframe.
I use Fastmail for my personal mail, and I don’t regret it, but I’m not quite as sold as you are, I guess maybe because I still have a few Google work accounts I need to use. Spam filtering in Fastmail is a little worse, and the search is _terrible_. The iOS app is usable but buggy. The easy masked emails are a big win though, and setting up new domains feels like less of a hassle with FM. I don’t regret using Fastmail, and I’d use them again for my personal email, but it doesn’t feel like a slam dunk.
This is a fairly silly list really, missing the bulk of what's been good reads for the last quarter century(!). It's heavily biased tothings that have sold well in the past few years. That said, the books on here are quite good. I'd definitely recommend Black Leopard, Red Wolf if you want fantasy from completely different story genetics (non-Tolkien). Priory is more traditional but good fun.
Not on this list that I thought were particularly excellent, [goodreads rating in brackets]:
[4.26] Between Two Fires by Christopher Buhuelman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543121-between-two-fir...
Horror-Fantasy. Absolutely loved this book, a travelogue through France in the grip of the Black Plague...inflicted upon humanity by Lucifer in the war on Heaven. See the sights as God abandons his children and devils in both man and mythic form ruin His creation. Takes on a hallucinatory, Book of Revelations, William Blake on bad acid feel and builds to a tremendous crescendo while retaining deep heart and complex characters.
Christopher Buhuelman is one of my favorite "new" authors, his new fantasy series The Blacktongue Thief[4.22] and The Daughters War[4.3] are both excellent as well. His horror chops enable him to to make what might be more traditional fantasy stories much more impactful. For example, The Daughters War is about an desperate existential war against goblins that is fucking horrifying, which is impressive for a critter traditionally deployed for comic effect or disposable fodder for the heroes to kick about. Even though you "know" that humans win in the end because of the chronology of the series (this was book takes place before the The Blacktongue Thief which was published first), it doesn't feel like it ever. Which is the magic of good horror writing, and is often missing from fantasy which can feel like there are no real stakes sometimes despite the epic scales presented.
[4.22] Piranesi by Susanna Clark
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi
Labyrinth-Fantasy. Another book I adored, this novel has a sense of place so tangible that I am convinced that it actually exists and Susanna has been there. Piransi lives in what amounts to a pocket dimension, an infinite labyrinthine house containing amongst other things an ocean whose tides rage through the halls, flooding and revealing them in turn.
[4.3] Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...
Alien Encounter-SciFi. Omitting this from any best of list shows the list isn't particularly serious, this novel is exceptional. On a distant exoplanet being terraformed for future humans, a disaster leaves the scientist in charge alone and cut off from humanity, and rather than seeding the new world with monkeys to be uplifted, she uplifts instead a small species of jumping spider. We experience its evolution across millenia and as its society reaches the space faring age, until it's encounter with the last desperate remnants of humanity, fleeing a doomed civilization and descending into barbarism. The narrative techniques to tell a story of this scope work exceptionally well and the whole tale moves quickly and with surprising emotional heft. To bring the audience to understand a world and society entirely unlike ours, and make it relatable and poignant is truly impressive. I really don't like spiders, but by the end of this book I was rooting for them... at humanity's expense.
Because of shifting demographics in the book buying market, readers looking for good yarns outside of the current trend of romantasy and/or cozy scifi/fantasy may feel a little left out, but there are tons of great authors that may be forgotten from these lists for a while. I heartily recommend:
Anything by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/215710.Joel_Shepherd, ex Spiral Wars series (scifi space opera with fascinating AI) [4.27-4.56], Cassandra Kressnov series (cyberpunk) [3.88-4.0], A Trial of Blood & Steel series (fantasy) [3.9-4.26].
Pierce Brown's Red Rising sci-fi series is excellent and magnificent in scope and scale.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie for gritty low fantasy with buckets of blood, humor, populated with legendary characters. The Bloody-Nine, Dogman, Black Dow, Caul mfing Shivers anyone? His latest series https://www.goodreads.com/series/211497-the-age-of-madness [4.45-4.6] was fantastic.
And of course the other books mentioned by other commenters, particularly anything by Ian M Banks.
No disrespect intended, but what is the point of using terminology like “moonshot” coupled with tiny amounts of funding like $3m. If moonshot is taken to be a loose reference to the Apollo program - which I imagine it is otherwise the name is poorly chosen - then the funding amounts are off by several orders of magnitude. In 1960 the US government got its feet wet with a 900 million (in 2020 dollars) spend on the Apollo program and ramped up to a high of 40,000 million a year by 1964. The total spent on the Apollo program between 1960 and 1973 was 283,000 million or almost one hundred thousand times as much as the 3 million investment under the moonshots fund.
Sure the 3 million is a seed round but the US spent 300 times as much on its exploratory “seed” round in 1960.
It is unlikely until he extreme that any real “moonshot” will achieve significant impact without the combined talents of a large percentage of the world greatest talents driven by goals of the highest social priority funded by limitless pockets and organized by the very best managers and leaders that society can produce.
Can confirm. Most government agencies have the SBIR program which funds 6 months of work for $100k. A phase II is $750k for 2 years. The Phase I is typically TRL 3/4 (though I've had a TRL 2 contract before). You'd be surprised what you can get done on such a small budget.
I also wonder if a $15mio valuation (20% for $3m) is a good deal for founders that have a moonshot idea and a first step that is reachable within 2 years and a plan of how to get there.
I mean if I had a plausible 2-year plan on how to fix the image processing part of self-driving cars and autonomous drones, just the knowledge of how I consider that possible might be worth more than $15m to Google, Uber, Skydio, or the DoD.
So to me, this looks more like a glorified way for teams without connections but with a great prototype to get introductions to the "real" investors that'll pony up $100m+
But, say, 250m will achieve nothing for true moonshots (like the ones mentioned on the site) without political will? Honestly, the example moonshots listed on the site NEED political will to succeed at all.
Typically seed funding is to prove the concept. Series A is to start scaling it. With Apollo you need to already have a proven concept ("We expect you to have a big vision and a “Tesla Roadster”—a concrete first step") before Apollo will invest. That's what makes it a Series A.
