> So your definition of memory safety includes some notion of "plausible" and "realistic"? Neither https://www.memorysafety.org/docs/memory-safety/ nor Wikipedia have such a qualification in their definition. It would help if you could just spell out your definition in full, rather than having us guess.
This is a strawman argument, you're arguing semantics here. You're a smart person, so you know exactly what he means. The perception created by your article is that people shouldn't use Go because it's not memory-safe. But the average developer hearing "not memory-safe" thinks of C/C++ level issues, with RCEs everywhere.
Unless you can show a realistic way this could be exploited for RCE in actual programs, you're just making noise. Further down the thread, you admit yourself that you're in a PLT research bubble and it shows.
Did you not notice how this started over someone saying "That's not the definition of memory safety" and then prevaricating about the bush when asked to provide their definition? Your theory that this is an argument over semantics is correct, but not fully understood.
> The perception created by your article is that people shouldn't use Go because it's not memory-safe.
Uh, where exactly am I saying or implying that?
I am, in fact, saying that Go is much closer to memory-safe languages than to C, safety-wise.
But I am arguing that the term "memory safe" should only be used for languages that actually went through the effort of thinking this problem through to the end and plugging all the holes through which memory safety violates can sneak in. Go is 99% there, but it's falling slightly short of the goal. I think that's a useful distinction, and I am disappointed that it is regularly swept under the rug, which is why I wrote this blog post. You are free to disagree, I never expected to convince everyone. But I think I gave some people some new food for thought, and that's all I can hope for.
Thinking that doing something like that will stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is naive. It's not a technical challenge for them, it's a political decision, only a political decision. If they really wanted to, they would already have it. Enriched material was transported from these centers some time ago, as news outlets have already reported.
As for the facts, and not just the narrative: 60% enrichment is not considered weapons-grade enrichment, and it is not illegal under the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Therefore, today's attack is an illegal act of aggression against another country, violating international law. Those are the facts.
Just curious where the enrichment fact you are claiming comes from. I see the NPT outlined 3% max while watchdogs detected over 80%. I didn’t think there were debates about them breaking the NPT
I am not sure how its only a political decision when they don't have control of their own airspace. How exactly do they rebuild when as soon as they start they get bombed. I think its more accurate to say it WAS a political decision. They had the capability but did not pursue it due to the fallout of doing so. The question its do they still retain the capability and will they ever be allowed to reclaim that capability if they lost it.
It's close to unknowable. The entire 500 kg stash of highly enriched uranium that we're fighting this war over has a volume of about 20 liters- not easy to track. Bombing the uranium doesn't unenriched it either unless you do something like drop an equal mass of depleted uranium and then hit it with enough explosives to thoroughly mix the two
I would like to see the confirmation as well. At the same time, it does sound plausible. Why keep the highly enriched uranium at the centrifuge site after you're done doing all the centrifuging.
The challenge for Israel is there's always a small chance your intelligence has a blind spot or is wrong. You can't prove a negative.
This is why I think the most likely scenario is that Israel will commit to regime change. Israel can't trust the current regime to not race to a nuclear weapon at this stage, and Israel can never be over 99% certain that a clandestine effort isn't being done outside of the current understanding of intelligence. "Assume the worst" seems to be a doctrine they adhere to.
And honestly I'm ok with Israel attempting to force regime change. I think they'll fail but whatevs.
The problem is that the US government appear to support them in whatever craziness they aim for. That's the part that makes this a lot more problematic.
There was regime change against the Russian Tsar in response to his failures in WW1. The rally around the flag didn't count for anything. If the weakness and failures of Khamenei becomes a reality strong enough to pierce through the perceptions shaped by state run media then I am putting my money on regime change. Maybe not right now but soon.
Happened with Japan in WW2, too, although that was a surrender rather than bottom up. But still a form of regime change. There are many ways it could play out.
There isn't anything special about Iran. It's anyone's political decision to use a nuke. So you make diplomatic decisions, war inclusive, to increase chances that you will not be nuked.
"I just used o3 to design a distributed scheduler that scales to 1M+ sxchedules a day. It was perfect, and did better than two weeks of thought around the best way to build this."
Anyone with 10 years in distributed systems at FAANG doesn’t need two weeks to design a distributed scheduler handling 1M+ schedules per day, that’s a solved problem in 2025 and basically a joke at that scale. That alone makes this person’s story questionable, and his comment history only adds to the doubt.
for others following along: the comment history is mostly talking about how software engineering is dead because AI is real this time with a few diversions to fixate on how overpriced university pedigrees are.
The US seems to be so far behind. For example, in Poland, Europe, you've had online instant bank payments for over 10 years. You’d go to a merchant’s site, click 'pay with my bank,' and an OAuth-like mechanism would log you into your bank to confirm the payment. Now it’s even easier with the introduction of BLIK, which lets you pay in shops, online, etc. Online payments are super simple: you click 'pay with BLIK' on a merchant’s site, go to your bank app (web or mobile), click the BLIK icon, and get a six-digit code valid for 60–180 seconds. You enter that code on the merchant site, and your mobile app shows 'Do you want to pay [xxx amount] to [merchant Y]?' You click yes, and that’s it.
Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker. The US is arguably the birthplace of credit but was one of the last to get chip and then tap. Right now the US is putting internet relays in low earth orbit and teaching computers to generate text on the fly, but the wired internet offerings are inferior to some third tier city in Bulgaria and customer service is abysmal.
Not saying this is who you are, but this is the argument I hear from Americans who have a vested interest in defending the illegal business practices of its cartels and monopolies. "This country is so big, that innovation is hard and will be slower."
I don't believe them. I think innovation is stymied either by monopoly, regulation or both. I think specifically we allowed monopoly to encroach in an unprecedented way since the Reagan era. I think there are a lot of rich guys breaking the law, the Sherman Act and its kin are real, the DOJ and the FTC have teeth again, America can be innovative in every field and it's time for action.
Enforcing antitrust law is the path to better products and services and maybe even a restoration of wealth equality to some degree, because historically starting businesses was what kept the fruits of the American economic pie more distributed than they are today.
A startup that I worked at that worked on municipal water infrastructure often had to sell to rural areas first because they didn't have a rollout of complex existing systems to decouple and migrate. I suspect that's analogous to what OP is describing; a situation where the entrenched system is difficult to replace because the operations of it are now engrained and well-understood.
For what it's worth, I think you're both right to some degree.
To agree with your point; if the entire EU, with country having completely different level of developpement and banking infrastructure and currency and language, managed to standardize and deploy unified SEPA wires including instant wires, then that argument cannot be accepted for the US.
It's easier and faster (and probably cheaper) for me to instant wire money from one euro to several thousand to any random Bulgarian person or business in their own currency, or for said business to take money from my account, while retaining all banking protection, than it is for two silicon valley Californian to do it short of using a private business solution.
Overall the state of the banking and payment infrastructure in the US compared to their advancement level always weirds members out. Well, not infrastructure not the right word, I'm sure the backend is great but what is exposed to people seem to suck.
It's your money you should be feeling in charge not finding solution to be able to use it.
Someone who defends the insanely slow speed of US innovation with consumer finance has not spent any amount of time talking to folks outside of the US.
There is this wild myth that the US is the only true developed economy.
The US is incredibly insular with how it approaches financial innovation.
As many of us deal with software, it’s the equivalent of “N-I-H Syndrome”.
We’re only just now starting to get Fedwire after India, Australia, the Eurozone, and countless other countries have had instant payments for a while.
> The US is incredibly insular with how it approaches financial innovation.
Financial innovation is more than debit transactions.
The US has thousands of financial products that don’t exist in Europe, far more widespread access to credit and a better credit scoring system, better fintech (For example it’s pretty trivial to get a competitively priced loan instantly approved online in a matter of minutes). Plus Europeans have absolutely garbage real estate products, most people are holding short term variable rate mortgages. I’m sorry but Id take the US system over that any day.
Just to clarify a detail, SEPA bank transfers are not instant yet and until very recently could take 6 days, even between banks in the same country and small amounts.
Coincidentally, this point came up in another HN thread about California enacting a rule that forces companies to make subscriptions cancelable with one-click.
I suspect you both actually agree. What they are highlighting is that the incumbents are actually slower to update or adopt newer technologies, often because they enjoy a position as you described where they don't feel normal market pressures due to a position as a monopoly or as a member of a cartel.
It's much more "will this cost us even a tiny bit more to implement compared to the status quo? Then no". US companies don't hesitate to innovate if it will save them money, especially in the short term (line must go up).
(1) the way to define up and coming economies seem to fit into confirmation bias and/or survivor bias.
(2) why is size such a strong variable?
(3) US had massive rollout of dial up, why/how did broadband get established if size of existing infrastructure is inversely correlated to adaption of new tech? (If I understand your argument correctly). Broadband should never really have rolled out. For that matter, there is a large deployment of satellite internet in the US, wouldn't your low earth satellite example also be a counterexample?
(4) why would advancement in one sector be counter evidence for market capture and regulatory hurdles in a different sector? The examples just seem unrelated.
(5) US internet speeds have been pretty slow for a long time. Could it be that market capture and lack of competition is a larger factor rather than the cost of adoption? Another example, Japan has been pretty far ahead of mobile phone tech for a while. If the cost of adaption of new tech were the biggest issue, wouldn't they have stagnated some time ago? That was an already saturated market for over a decade, yet still moved forward.
(6) could it be more important that new markets lack existing monopolistic capture?
Though, I will agree that existing infrastructure/deployments do create an inertia for stagnation. I have that view for US road infrastructure. It is all going to last many decades more, and with it the single occupancy vehicle.
> it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker.
My credit card in the UK had chip-and-PIN in 2004 - it was probably around earlier too, though less common. Almost every bank card issued has had contactless for over 10 years too. Simply being a developed economy is not the only reason!
I was using something called "cash" (I think? Not sure) I think here in Sweden in the 90s, probably around 1998, which was chip but NO pin, ie. just like cash, if you lost your card you lost the cash.. That was supported in a very few places but I was constantly nagging shops to support it.
This was then gone for a good while, whereas today I guess its back in a way, you get some kinds oy payments (food etc) without pin, and a few others, until it will require a pin, then allows a few more pin-less buys, but I think it also depends on the sum.
Oh come on! Everybody knows the UK didn't even have banking until Oasis released their first single! Sometimes it gets hard living in the USA, where we have to invent everything for everybody else all the time.
Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states. The US had wire transfers since the 19th century, credit cards as we recognize them today since the 70s, online shopping since the 90s and online money transfer like Paypal since the 2000s. That eurozone countries would want to standardize on something and happen to largely escape regulatory capture is fairly predictable.
Many European countries had online banking in the 80s. Largely because banks were focused on efficiency, and they wanted to replace checks with wire transfers and domestic debit cards. In order to do that, they had to make wire transfers as convenient as possible.
When online shopping first appeared, wire transfers were the obvious form of payment. Few people had credit cards, because most shops didn't accept them. And shops didn't accept them, because they were too expensive.
(When I got a credit card in the early 2000s, one of the things they emphasized in the marketing was that you could withdraw money from foreign ATMs. And you usually got a better rate than by exchanging cash. It's kind of funny that you are not supposed to use an American credit card for that.)
You don't reverse it. It's like a cash transaction in the sense that it's irrevocable, which means people understand it intuitively. But unlike cash, there is an effectively permanent record of the transaction, connected to the participants' legal identities. That tends to discourage scammers. And it all happens within a single jurisdiction.
This is not true, you can reverse SEPA transfers via your bank. You do need a reason though and there are time limits but if a seller just runs away with your money you don't have to go through the courts in the general case.
> Right but those countries are comparable in size and GDP to US states
Yes? So in theory it should be significantly harder to implement a EU wide system when it’s much more decentralized than the US. Yet it only took a few years for SEPA and later instant payments to become universally supported across the EU.
Also developed European countries had all of those things you’ve listed in similar timeframes.
Cool. And how is that even remotely relevant to anything related to the topic of hand?
If your argument made any sense, you'd be using GDP per capita. And there the US is beaten by e.g. Switzerland, Ireland, Norway (skipping microstates) and all of them are around a decade ahead of the US in banking, at least.
> the world's biggest payments network, saying it propped up an illegal monopoly over debit payments by imposing "exclusionary" agreements on partners and smothering upstart firms.
Is it the size of the US or the exclusionary agreements? I think without these agreements new payment systems would proliferate faster
> Regulatory hurdles from incumbents aside, it's generally the case that a less developed, up-and-coming economy will have new stuff quicker
SEPA is Eurozone wide and has existed for 15+ years. Instant payments were only introduced in 2017 but it didn’t take much time for banks in Germany, Italy, Spain etc. to support them.
US is an economic powerhouse due to land/population sizes, but if you look at attention is all you need paper (for example): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 majority of it is imported talent.
It's like saying that because Apple is paying a Chinese factory to build phones that Apple "builds phones".
Bruh, the only thing the US excels at is high income / cost of living, and making cool infrastructure for the rest of the world, which for some reason it doesn’t adopt.
This system is really subpar, because it excludes people that don't have a local bank account. I remember in Estonia not being able to book a doctor appointment because the website only had those means of payment, but no "pay with credit card" option.
On the contrary, credit cards are a neutral standard, which is interoperable. It can be improved but it's vastly better than bank OAuth.
Even Cambodia has had instant bank transfers for years now. They are trying to figure out how to get tourists into the system because locals hardly use cash anymore.
It appears that you are the only person in this discussion making many incorrect assumptions. Based on your comments, I would assume you are actually googling those papers based on their abstracts. Your last linked paper has flawed methodology for what it attempts to demonstrate, as shown in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477
The tests you're requesting are provided within the previously linked papers. I'm not sure what you want. Do you expect people to copy and paste entire papers here that show methodology and describe experiments?
You wrote, "I'm asking you to define 'real reasoning'," which is actually defined in the blog post linked earlier in this discussion. In fact, the entire blog post is about this topic. It appears that you are not thoroughly reading the material. Your replies resemble those of a human stochastic parrot.
>Your last linked paper has flawed methodology for what it attempts to demonstrate, as shown in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.02477
Genuinely, What's wrong with the methodology?
Your paper literally admits humans would also perform worse at counterfactuals. Worse than a LLM ? Maybe not but it never bothers to test this so...
The problem here is that none of the definitions (those that are testable) so far given actually separate humans from LLMs. They're all tests some humans would also flounder at or that LLMs perform far greater than chance at, if below some human's level.
If you're going to say, "LLMs don't do real reasoning because of x" then x better be something all humans clear if what humans do is "real reasoning".
Humans perform worse at counterfactuals so saying "Hey, see this paper that shows LLMs doing the same, It means they don't reason" is a logical fallacy if you don't extend that conclusion to humans as well.
In these arguments it's always very notable that not only do people not benchmark LLMs against people, but several I've discussed with have argued very strongly for not doing so unless they're benchmarked against above average people. While arguing that these same tests prove LLMs can reason. It never seems to land with them that their standards for "reason" would exclude large portions of the human population to some state of lesser being without the ability to reason.
I'm not sure I agree with you, in the Humans Right report and Amnesty International report they clearly show evidence for systemic apartheid. Also former UN chief says Israel’s treatment of Palestinians may constitute apartheid [2].
Overview[1]:
"Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive governments have created and maintained a system of laws, policies, and practices designed to oppress and dominate Palestinians. This system plays out in different ways across the different areas where Israel exercises control over Palestinians’ rights, but the intent is always the same: to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.
Israeli authorities have done this through four main strategies:
Fragmentation into domains of control
At the heart of the system is keeping Palestinian separated from each other into distinct territorial, legal and administrative domains
Dispossession of land and property
Decades of discriminatory land and property seizures, home demolitions and forced evictions
Segregation and control
A system of laws and policies that keep Palestinians restricted to enclaves, subject to several measures that control their lives, and segregated from Jewish Israelis
Deprivation of economic & social rights
The deliberate impoverishment of Palestinians keeping them at great disadvantage in comparison to Jewish Israelis"
I dislike repeating myself but once again, per Wikipedia, apartheid is a "system of institutionalised racial segregation".
That Amnesty article contradicts that definition. It's talking about mistreating people in East Jerusalem, aka The West Bank, which again, is not part of Israel, has its own government, etc. And what is the primary race of those people in the West Bank? Arab. And Arabs comprise how much of the Israeli population? Around 20%. And are those Israeli Arabs being systemically mistreated, as though by apartheid? If they are, then this "apartheid" not only directly opposes Israel's declaration of independence, but it's a strange type of Apartheid that is highly supportive of Arabs becoming doctors at roughly double the expected rate per capita in Israel.
Yes, Israel is treating people differently, but it's not based on skin color or race. It's based on whether they live inside its national borders.
This is a complex and nuanced situation but please try to understand that it's dangerous to unilaterally redefine words the way that Amnesty does in that article. There's a huge difference between widespread systemic racism and some bad apples illegally occupying land outside a nation's borders.
It appears that they do not contradict that definition. Please read this article, where you can find the definitions in the context of the crime of apartheid:
There is a section there about definition of racial discrimination, it's not only about race.
"According to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD),
the term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.[17]
This definition does not make any difference between discrimination based on ethnicity and race, in part because the distinction between the two remains debatable among anthropologists.[18] Similarly, in British law the phrase racial group means "any group of people who are defined by reference to their race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origin"
To be fair, Israel was doing some bad stuff to them within its borders in the 1960s but "In 1966, martial law was lifted completely, and the government set about dismantling most of the discriminatory laws, while Arab citizens were granted the same rights as Jewish citizens under law".
It seems like the main issue today is treating people differently based on whether they currently live on the other side of a national border. Ex: apparently marriage to an Israeli is no longer a path to Israeli citizenship for Palestinians residing outside Israel- https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-knesset-pa...
But many, if not most, countries have policies that similarly punish people outside their borders so I don't see how that is particularly damning for Israel.
And Israel has been editing the equivalent of their Bill of Rights (ie. the Israeli Basic Laws) to grant certain civil rights fundamentally only to it's Jewish citizens.
Have you even read the actual legal text [1] for the Nation-State law? It basically just says that Israel will always retain certain elements of Jewish culture such as the flag, anthem, holidays, and official language. No one is preventing non-Jews from partaking in those cultural artifacts, just like how no one is preventing Mexican Americans from celebrating the 4th of July and no one prevents them from speaking Spanish.
Is every country now required to sing Kumbaya and officially honor every major culture within a 1000km radius? Can they not officially declare that certain cultural things are more important to them than others?
What would happen if that part was removed and 100 years from now, another group tried to claim Israel as their self-determined government?
Every time Jewish people try to be a peaceful minority inside someone else's society, they face discrimination, exile, or pogroms. And it just happens that many government leaders of neighboring countries have repeatedly declared their intention (or heck, literally tried) to mass murder them.
As someone who has orchestrated two coups in different organizations, where the leadership did not align with the organization's interests and missions, I can assure you that the final stage of such a coup is not something that can be executed after just an hour of preparation or thought. It requires months of planning. The trigger is only pulled when there is sufficient evidence or justification for such action. Building support for a coup takes time and must be justified by a pattern of behavior from your opponent, not just a single action. Extensive backchanneling and one-on-one discussions are necessary to gauge where others stand, share your perspective, demonstrate how the person in question is acting against the organization's interests, and seek their support. Initially, this support is not for the coup, but rather to ensure alignment of views. Then, when something significant happens, everything is already in place. You've been waiting for that one decisive action to pull the trigger, which is why everything then unfolds so quickly.
How are you still hireable? If I knew you orchestrated two coups at previous companies and I was responsible for hiring, you would be radioactive to me. Especially knowing that all that effort went into putting together a successful coup over other work.
Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder, Charlie Cheever. If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.
Let me pose a theoretical. Let’s say you’re a VP or Senior Director. One of your sibling directors or VPs is over a department and field you have intimate domain knowledge. Meaning you have a successful track record in that field both from a management side and an IC side.
Now, that sibling director allows a culture of sexual harassment, law breaking, and toxic throat slitting behavior. HR and the Organizations leadership is aware of this. However the company is profitable, outside his department happy, and stable. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Is it still “the domain of the petty” to have a plan to replace them? To have formed relationships to work around them, and keep them in check? To have enacted policies outside their department to ensure the damage doesn’t spread?
And most importantly to enact said replacement plan when they fuck up just enough leadership gives them the side-eye, and you push the issue with your documentation of their various grievances?
Because that… is a coup. That is a coup that is atleast in my mind moral and just, leading to the betterment of the company.
“Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail. Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems. Captains always evacuate all passengers before they leave the ship. Else they go down with it.
> “Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail.
Yes, exactly. In fact, it's corruption of leadership.
If an engineer came to the leader about a critical technical problem and said, 'our best choice is to pretend it's not there', the leader would demand more of the engineer. At a place like OpenAI, they might remind the engineer that they are the world's top engineers at arguably the most cutting edge software organization in the world, and they are expected to deliver solutions to the hardest problems. Throwing your hands up and ignoring the problem is just not acceptable.
Leaders need to demand the same of themselves, and one of their jobs is to solve the leadership problems that are just as difficult as those engineering problems - to deliver leadership results to the organization just like the engineer delivers engineering results, no excuses, no doubts. Many top-level leaders don't have anyone demanding performance of them, and don't hold themselves to the same standards in their job - leadership, management - as they hold their employees.
> Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems.
Even there, I think you are going to easy on them. Only in hindsight do you maybe say, 'I don't see what could have been done.' At the moment, you say 'I don't see it yet, so I have to keep looking and innovating and finding a way'.
Max Levchin was an organizer of two coups while at PayPal. Both times, he believed it was necessary for the success of the company. Whether that was correct or not, they eventually succeeded and I don’t think the coups really hurt his later career.
PayPal had an exit, but it absolutely did not succeed in the financial revolution it was attempting. People forget now that OG PayPal was attempting the digital financial revolution that later would be bitcoin’s raison d'être.
Dismissing PayPal as anything but an overwhelming business success takes a lot of confidence. Unless you Gates or Zuckerburg, etc., I don't know how you have anything but praise for PayPal from that perspective.
Comparing PayPal's success in digital finance to cryptocurrency's is an admission against interest, as they say in the law.
I think getting to an IPO in any form during the wreckage of the Dotcom crash counts as an impressive success, even if their vision wasn't fully realized.
Yep. PayPal was originally a lot like venmo (conceptually -- of course we didn't have phone apps then). It was a way for people to send each other money online.
This example seems to be survivorship bias. Personally, if someone approached me to suggest backstabbing someone else, I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't eventually backstab me as well. @bear141 said "People should oppose openly or leave." [1] and I agree completely. That said, don't take vacations! (when Elon Musk was ousted from PayPal in the parent example, etc.)
> I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't eventually backstab me as well.
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
I had this exact thing happen a few weeks ago in a company that I have invested in. That didn't quite pan out in the way the would-be coup party likely intended. To put it mildly.
I feel like in the parent comment coup is sort of shorthand for the painful but necessary work of building consensus that it is time for new leadership. Necessary is in the eye of the beholder. These certainly can be petty when they are bald-faced power grabs, but they equally can be noble if the leader is a despot or a criminal. I would also not call Sam Altman's ouster a coup even if the board were manipulated into ousting him, he was removed by exactly the people who are allowed to remove him. Coups are necessarily extrajudicial.
It also looks like Sam Altman was busy creating another AI company, along his creepy WorldCoin venture, wasteful crypto/bitcoin support and no less creepy stories of abuse coming from his younger sister.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
Why is there a presumption that it must take precedence over other work?
I've run or defended against 'grassroots organizations transformations' (aka, a coup) at several non-profit organizations, and all of us continued to do our daily required tasks while the politicking was going on.
Because any defense of being able to orchestrate a professional coup and do your other work with the same zeal and focus as you did before fomenting rebellion I take as seriously as people who tell me they can multitask effectively.
It's just not possible. We're limited in how much energy we can bring to daily work, that's a fact. If your brain is occupied both with dreams of king-making and your regular duties at the job, your mental bandwidth is compromised.
I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice. Justified or not, those coups set the company on a downward spiral it never recovered from.
I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
> I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice...I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
So you hired coupers but you would never hire...coupers? Did you not know about their coups cuz that's the only way I can see that makes sense here. Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
These people were early hires at a company I co-founded (but was not in an official leadership role at). They had never pulled a coup before, but they would do so within two years of being hired. The coup didn’t affect me directly, and indeed happened when I was out of the country and was presented as a fait accompli. But nevertheless I left not long thereafter as the company had already begun its downward slide.
The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.
Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.
>So you hired coupers but you would never hire...coupers? Did you not know about their coups cuz that's the only way I can see that makes sense here. Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
You might have missed this from GP's comment:
>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup
In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.
If I'm confident in my competence and the candidate has a trustworthy and compelling narrative about how they undermined incompetent leadership to achieve a higher goal - yep, for sure.
Also, ones persons incompetent is anothers performer.
Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.
But being in a situation where this was called for twice?
That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.
The regular HN commenter says "ceos are bad useless and get paid too much" but now when someone suggests getting rid of one of them suddenly its the end of the world
Agreed. Whilst I don’t trust China’s CCP, I sure as heck don’t trust anything from Falun Gong. Those guys are running an asymmetric battle against the Chinese State and frankly they would be capable of saying anything if it helped their cause.
Interesting. The Wikipedia's declaration about them being "new religious movement" is inconsistent with the body of the article. It looks like it started as some kind of Chi Kung exercise and wellness group, but it got big very fast and Chinese Government got concerned about their popularity. Then, under CCP persecution, it escalated and morphed into a full-blown political dissident movement. Initially viewed favorably by the press as a dissident movement. Now, Wikipedia article is very unfavorable because The Epoch Times misalignment with press. Ok, I think I understand.
I wouldn't trust either the CCP or Falun Gong to speak my weight, they are both power structures and they are both engaging in all kinds of PR exercises to put themselves in the best light. But to Falun Gong's credit: I don't think they've engaged in massive human rights violations so they have that going for them. But there are certain cult like aspects to it and 'new religious movement' or not I think that the fewer such entities there are the better (and also fewer of the likes of the CCP please).
I would never work with you. This is why investors have such a bad reputation. If I had not retained 100% ownership and control of my business, I am sure someone like you would have tossed me out by now.
I don't see anything novel there. With millions of videos and content creators on the platform, it was statistically highly probable that one of these videos would match what he should create. It's like advanced collaborative filtering. If I tell you that you sometimes miss opportunities, it's not because I'm clairvoyant, but because statistically, most people do.
You seem to imply that novel things are not statistically highly probable as a chain of thought in a specific context. That's a significant claim and I'm not sure we'd all agree on.
I believe one of the main problems with the current generation of LLMs is that they are constrained by statistics. Unless there exists a universal pattern that can address all problems, and we require an enormous amount of parameters and training for it to emerge, these models may never effectively solve the problems that matter most to us and that we find challenging to address on our own.
> If I tell you that you sometimes miss opportunities, it's not because I'm clairvoyant, but because statistically, most people do.
Your choice of the word "clairvoyant" is revealing. So-called clairvoyants, palm readers, horoscopes, fortune-tellers, and so forth, lean on cold-reading skills. As it happens, the kind of information LLMs have about things like what people on the internet do for content creation is exactly the sort of thing that allows a high degree of Barnum effect to influence the person.
This is a strawman argument, you're arguing semantics here. You're a smart person, so you know exactly what he means. The perception created by your article is that people shouldn't use Go because it's not memory-safe. But the average developer hearing "not memory-safe" thinks of C/C++ level issues, with RCEs everywhere.
Unless you can show a realistic way this could be exploited for RCE in actual programs, you're just making noise. Further down the thread, you admit yourself that you're in a PLT research bubble and it shows.
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