Product @GitHub (Copilot CLI/Agentic Platforms) Owner/Lead Dev @MinecraftParks |fmr @Microsoft @BrownUniversity |Views are my own
Orlando, FL
Joined April 2012
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Here's a video of the Test Track Design Studio experience recreated in Minecraft -- we tried to match the game mechanics as best we could, so if you know how to get a high score in real life you should fare pretty well on here!
🚗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! 🖥️
I was eagerly awaiting my cathartic hate-read of Bob Chapek's memoir after watching him as a theme park enthusiast from 2015-2022. Judging by the book's sales numbers, I was one of the only ones who was so excited. BUT BOY DID I HAVE THOUGHTS!
Part I of my review:
Chapek fancies himself a "disruptor." While it's true he often challenged Hollywood norms and occasionally put his weight behind disruptive tech, more often his disruptions were operations changes that came at the expense of the consumer (despite Chapek spinning them as giving people what they wanted!) and portended his lack of understanding of Disney's product.
He came to Disney by way of selling cat food, and (respectfully) it shows. For a guy who told his future wife on their first date that he'd become CEO, his escapades portray a marketer who values exploiting latent demand for existing assets over advancing the product itself, at the expense of the very thing that made the assets valuable in the first place.
Emerging story this election night: GOOD CANDIDATES WILL WIN OUT. Don't be scared of not fitting the mold the "powers that be" expect of you.
- Megadonor money has a ceiling! Lots of late GOP spending didn't move the map in races with poor candidates. Candidates need not kowtow to billionaires if it's not what's in their constituents' interests.
- You can be competitive (or even win!) without the support of your party's leaders! Dems who actively kept the party at arm's length, weren't the party's chosen candidate in the primaries, or were lacking national money are still doing great. Candidates don't need to match the party platform if their views are in touch with their constituents and they can speak intelligently and thoughtfully on the issues rather than regurgitate talking points.
Sure, it's an antiestablishment cycle. Sure, some of these GOP candidates were just impressively bad. But I hope that we've permanently expanded our definition of what "electable" is!
I've been using a Surface Laptop Ultra for the last couple weeks -- the magnetic USB-C connector is really really cool and I'm not just saying that because I work there
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.
It's crazy to me that Sam presents this like it's a big revelation that customers don't want to be charged a surprise amount of money?
"Like AWS," that thing everyone loves the pricing structure of!
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."
Hmmmm maybe we consider how to increase DRAM production rather than imply that it's wrong for people to want to own their inference?
We got where we are with DRAM scarcity because of regulatory capture and cartel behavior. I wouldn't want inference to become the same story.
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”
Absolutely in love with the "Mo's Diner" activation at #GitHubUniverse -- especially the back-of-house kitchen set!
Time for #GitHubUniverse! What a year it's been since we introduced the CLI last year! Let's celebrate how we're "All Together Now!"
If you're in person: I have a couple talks on the schedule today, come say hi!
I finally got a Litter Robot.
While onboarding it into Home Assistant, I was tickled that the integration wants to import my cat as an entity
It's very silly that this movie exists, but "venmo request Ebenezer Scrooge" is a very funny bit
Ebenezer Scrooge is now on @venmo. Think he’s feeling generous? 💰 Send a request: venmo.com/u/EBENEZERmovie
I started building something like this because I wanted to meet more stray cats in my neighborhood.
I stopped when I realized people might use the info to do harm to them.
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]
I'm thrilled I got an excuse to work on hybrid local model routing these last few weeks!!!
We have a lot more in the pipeline to help you leverage on-device intelligence to keep as much of your AI local as feasible while seamlessly reaching out to the cloud where needed!
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
Not many people know this, but Anthropic actually invented time travel so they could go back in time to the 80's and start training their models by opening threads on theme park BBSes
Horrible news: Chapek self-narrates the audiobook. I don't want to listen to this man speak for 7.5 hours
Exactly one year removed from the Copilot CLI's initial public launch! This was my moonshot pipe-dream when we started hacking a new harness together last summer (before most people were using the word "harness!")
Such an awesome team made this possible. S/O to @patniko leading the evangelism mission across Microsoft, so much more effective than I could have done alone!
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.