Indeed. I built a Raspberry Pi Pico based controller for some flashing LEDs on my drone. It has red and blue LEDs and I wanted them to flash with the cycle of three short flashes then a pause; alternately the red LEDs then the blue LEDS. Took barely a minute to code that in python and dump it onto the board. In such cases it doesn't matter that the language is interpreted because the task is not demanding of the hardware.

The "Police Drone" still flies to this day! :-)

How interesting it would be to do a drive-around with an open wifi hotspot in the car -- just to see how many LG TV sets try to connect and find out what data they send.

Just saying, for a friend :)

The thing here is that there isn't "Apple". There is Apple-the-parent-company, and Apple UK. From the perspective of law, Apple-the-parent is a supplier to Apple UK. Apple UK will have been ordered not to disclose information, including its suppliers. Therefore nothing restricts Apple-the-parent other than its contract as a supplier to Apple UK.

Yes I'm aware that sounds odd, but I deal with these situations fairly regularly (although am not any form of lawyer, this is absolutely not legal advice etc.). Contracts between international entities are common, and Apple US would not be in breach of US law but would be in breach of contract and would place Apple UK in breach of UK law by doing so.

Am not taking the UK government's side on this - I personally think the order is nuts and yep, I'm British. I'm just trying to show why the relationship would be more complex. Legally Apple US could disclose of course. However I'll bet you it has a supplier contract with Apple UK, a legally distinct entity, that says something like "the terms of this agreement will be bound by UK law". Hence it would be in breach of contract, and that could place Apple UK at legal risk in the UK.

Yeah, it’s easy to think that making a biological weapon is as easy as just following a series of steps, but it’s not. It’s going to require labs and source materials that are going to be hard to get without somebody noticing. State-sponsored groups already have access to these, and you better believe they already have at least looked at weapon-building scenarios or small-scale prototypes. Isolated actors are going to have a much harder time, even if they have PhDs.

Did some reading off the back of your comment and yep - I now remember the fuss when that happened. Had totally forgotten it, Slashdot even did an article at the time. I'd so associated them with Nintendo that I got it mixed up.

Sort of. It’s clear that Tristan and Levant were working on NS and had generated a preliminary proof that was still being verified. They were taking their time to cleanup the proofs so that they could be presented elegantly, but then OpenAI gained access to their unpublished work, evidenced by the wording of the prompt they claimed to have used, and rushed to scoop them. This kind of shit happens all the time in academia. It’s rather unsurprising that it would also happen between OpenAI and Anthropic.

Which in itself is appropriate (most employees of companies have a responsibility to protect trade secrets from competitors), but the problem here is they wanted to take credit for getting to a solution faster than their competitor, which they did using publicly non-disclosed information.

And because OpenAI is desperate to show that their models can generate proofs to hard problems, this scenario is highly likely. They were augmenting their training data with examples of partial proofs and “Oh look, there is a nice draft of a paper that someone was editing with Codex”

They also heard that someone at Anthropic was working on this, so they decided that it was imperative they publish first.

I remember the very first big box game in the UK. It was Sabre Wulf, from Ultimate Play The Game. At the time, games were around £5.99 to £7.99 - Sabre Wulf was the first £9.99 game in the UK and they part justified it by having a bigger box.

Since everything at that point came on cassette, this was annoying as hell because you couldn't fit it into your cassette holders that you definitely, definitely had as an 8 bit gamer in the UK. No stranger to later price gouging, Ultimate became Rare and was bought by Nintendo. I still think Nintendo is lord of the overpricing, at least these days (in ye olden times there was the NeoGeo charging £300 for a game back in the early 1980s. I think PC Engine charged a fortune too. But absolutely nobody had these in the UK).

If you read Tristan’s actual statement, which someone posted a link to below, the reason he is suspicious is because the details are of the approach, including the specific wording used in the prompt, were non-obvious. That and the timing of when the work supposedly started circumstantially points to theft of Tristan and Levant’s work. Tristan does not actually accuse of OpenAI of theft because he doesn’t have any proof, but the sequence of events is definitely suspicious.

There is also the issue of the pressure tactics: respond to a meeting invite the same day, respond to a meeting invite on Sunday of Labor Day weekend, release your proof so that we can follow up with ours the next day. They clearly were rushing their result because they wanted to scoop anything that Anthropic may have been working on. Meanwhile, Tristan is more interested in the academic discourse, but he can no longer release the result he wanted to release, because writing good proofs takes time and OpenAI didn’t want to give him that time.

Sorry, uh what? Bohr’s model is not useful for anything beyond hydrogen. That’s why high school chemistry classes only teach it as the first step in the historical development of atomic orbital theory.

Yes... we could destroy Putin's nuclear torpedo before it even made it to the UK coast! :-P

I'm British, and have been following this from the other side of the story. In the UK it's more fragmented - this year England is up, but Scotland and Wales are down and in some cases quite significantly. Wales seems to have taken a hell of a hit in reading for instance.

It's better news in maths and science but we're still behind where we were five-seven years ago except for science. Definitely a mixed bag, though all improvements are welcome of course.

Did you guys ever actually believe that land of the free stuff? Wow.

And fair play too. The West doesn't subsidize it's companies to give them an advantage in foreign markets, it invades and bombs the shit out of the entire economy and then sells them "reconstruction services" on interest bearing loans.

So yea. Fuck anyone that whines about Chinese subsidies.