Ryan Hecht

🚗Attention on the Sim Track! 🚗 🚘#TestTrack is now open on MCParks 🚘 🖥️Connect at Main.MCParks.us (Java Edition) to design and test your perfect car! 🖥️

A couple weeks ago, we introduced Surface Laptop Ultra, including our new magnetic USB-C power connector. One of the things we spend a lot of time on in Surface is getting the feel of an interaction just right. With this connector, it's about how the magnets guide it into place, the sound and LED that let you know it's connected, and how easily it releases. The team built hundreds of prototypes, experimenting with magnet sizes, positions, forces, and cable alignment. One of my favorite details: moving the magnets just 0.7mm changed the experience from needing a final push to smoothly finding its way into place. Once we found the right feel, the next challenge was making it repeatable. The team selected a prototype that captured the experience we wanted, then worked through simulations and multiple manufacturing iterations to reproduce that feel in production. And it had to hold up. Thousands of connection cycles, off-axis pulls, and tests for the kinds of forces a cable might experience when someone trips over it. The cable has another useful detail: flip it around, and you can charge other USB-C devices, like your phone. A lot of work across industrial design, mechanical engineering, reliability, and manufacturing to make one small interaction feel right.

Sam Altman says tokens are "fake from of a business from value point of view." Open ai almost stopped charging on tokens. Sam Altman: "We almost made what would've been a bad call, to say we're not going to price our next model in tokens at all. You're just going to give it a prompt, and we're going to give you a price back. It's going to be like AWS to you. Just do something and we send you a bill." "But the customer response on that is so negative. They're like, 'I need to know what I'm paying for somehow." "I asked a few people, 'Would you rather pay more for the same output, but have it priced in some number of consistent tokens ?' Even if we inflated the tokens, they're like, 'Oh, I'd much rather you inflate the tokens and pay more, because I know there's a real thing there.' "People don't just want us to give them a price, because they feel like over the long term they're going to get screwed somehow." "I would rather not make up a fake unit. Tokens are a kind of fake unit. I mean, they're real in some sense, but they're not a good unit." "They're fake from a business value point of view."

sam: local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources “a lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that”

We’re serving up Stacked PRs pancakes at #GitHubUniverse 🥞

John starts headbanging in a malfunction on Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom.

Ebenezer Scrooge is now on @venmo. Think he’s feeling generous? 💰 Send a request: venmo.com/u/EBENEZERmovie

Someone made an app that lets you collect real cats like ‘Pokémon GO’ You can snap a pic of any cat you spot, add it to your collection, and even use a map to discover cats people have found around the world [via/ cat collector.app]

Learn more about how we are bringing local models and sandboxed tools to GitHub Copilot to help you maintain both choice and control over your workflows ⬇️ gh.io/localdevelopment

Initially Copilot was just a brand that multiple (some may argue too many) adopted in our products. Each implementation was unique and product experiences varied widely. Now, company wide, we are using the same harness, the GitHub Copilot SDK. This is a monumental achievement for a company the size of Microsoft.

NEW: The Walt Disney Company has named Karandeep Anand, most recently CEO of Character.AI, to the newly created role of Chief Technology Officer, effective Oct. 2. Anand will oversee Disney’s enterprise technology, infrastructure, data and AI platforms, product and engineering.

“Look at my incredible new factory!” Yo that’s cool, what do you make? “It’s highly optimised, fully automated, zero tolerance for defects and with a continuous feedback cycle” Cool cool, so what do you actually make? “I can interact with it on my phone, laptop, messenger, completely async, and the shared context means it’s always learning how to get better” Very impressive, but what do you make? “Every agent has full context, can spawn other agents, review their work, fix defects, and ship continuously.” yes yes. WHAT DOES IT MAKE? “Software.” Oh nice. What software? “Well right now we’re mostly using it to improve the factory.” Improve it to make what? “Anything!” Such as? “…a better factory.”