Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.
The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.
I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
> Today, 1,165 Bob Ross originals — a trove worth millions of dollars — sit in cardboard boxes inside the company’s nondescript office building in Herndon, Virginia.
This seems like a bit of a waste given that there's demand for them.
And the most important thing about PCC in my opinion is not the technical aspect (though that's nice) but that Apple views user privacy as something good to be maximized, differing from the view championed by OpenAI and Anthropic (and also adopted by Google and virtually every other major LLM provider by this point) that user interactions must be surveilled for "safety" purposes. The lack of privacy isn't due to a technical limitation--it's intended, and they often brag about it.
> Yet this approach is obviously much better than what’s being done at companies like OpenAI, where the data is processed by servers that employees (presumably) can log into and access.
No need for presumption here: OpenAI is quite transparent about the fact that they retain data for 30 days and have employees and third-party contractors look at it.
> Our access to API business data stored on our systems is limited to (1) authorized employees that require access for engineering support, investigating potential platform abuse, and legal compliance and (2) specialized third-party contractors who are bound by confidentiality and security obligations, solely to review for abuse and misuse.
This sort of convenient semi-arbitrary extension of a partial function is ubiquitous in Lean 4 mathlib, the most active mathematics formalization project today. It turns out that the most convenient way to do informal math and formal math differ in this aspect.
> many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day.
Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.
In Meta's case, the problem is that they had been given the go-ahead by the EU to train on certain data, and then after starting training, the EU changed its mind and told them to stop.
A fun point in the article: Burton got into the industry via Rollercoaster Tycoon experience:
> Curiosity became an obsession in his teens, when he started to play RollerCoaster Tycoon, a computer game that allowed him to devise his own rides. [...] In the end he won the job, he said, on the strength of those speculative rollercoasters he had made in a video game.
That was strange. I had to reread it to confirm that he's just talking about some random kid looking at the publicly-available game data files, not an employee or anyone else with special access.
All sorts of technology can be used secretly to assist criminal enterprises. Cars, computers, pencils, electricity, etc. It's unfair to hold LLMs to a higher standard than what applies to nearly everything else.
Since they're building a special-purpose accelerator for a certain class of models, what I'd like to see is some evidence that those models can achieve competitive performance (once the hardware is mature). Namely, simulate these models on conventional hardware to determine how effective they are, then estimate what the cost would be to run the same model on Extropic's future hardware.