yafbum's comments

> He could likely have $500M-$10B+ lined up by next week to start up a new company and poach much of the talent from OpenAI.

Following the Jobs analogy, this could be another NeXT failure story. Teams are made by their players much more than by their leaders; competent leaders are a necessary but absolutely insufficient condition of success, and the likelihood that whatever he starts next reproduces the team conditions that made OpenAI in the first place are pretty slim IMO (while still being much larger than anyone else's).

Inferring someone's demographic attributes by observing their behaviors isn't very new or specific to LLMs. Basic stats can do the job well enough, and ML classification models have been trained on this for a while. What's new here I guess is that LLMs already have such inference capability built in, even though they are very general-purpose?

Not hard, lawyer not needed. If you want someone to hold your hand through it to allay some anxiety then feel free to hire a lawyer, but honestly they'd just be doing project management.

Neither do mine, but it happens in some night clubs for example.

Every social app is a party, and every party peters out one way or another. Too few people? It's dead. Too many people? Chilling effects. No budget to police the place? It becomes a magnet for abuse / spam / porn / scams / human trafficking / you name it. This party lasted more than most, they should be proud to have had such a long run.

Every root capability will be abused in time. Either by malice or by (human or technical) exploitation

It looks very similar to the "Logic Alphabet".

http://www.logic-alphabet.net/images/flipstick_2347_2.jpg

Both are systems of symbols meant to encode 4 bits of information. In both cases, pointy bits in the corners of the symbols represent 1 or true, while round bits are 0 or false.

A difference is that in the case of bibi-binary the intent is to encode numbers, while the intent of the logic alphabet is to encode truth tables of binary logic operators. But fundamentally they encode the same information.

The other difference is that the inventor of bibi-binary was a comedian who obviously did it as a tongue-in-cheek novelty, while the logic alphabet's creator appears to have been quite convinced of the importance of his invention...

A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting.

By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't.

His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive around the coil so that, for a fraction of a second, the magnetic field at the center of the coil became the most intense ever built by mankind, before the whole setup was destroyed by the splattering of liquid copper thousands of degrees hot. Errors and miscalculations in that work environment meant that people could die unpleasant deaths very quickly.

So when he looked at math PhD students who at most got chalk dust onto their sweater, calling themselves scientists, he disagreed.

In the English speaking world, high tolerance for accents does seem to be the norm. My experience is that there are also countries outside of it with a much stronger normative accent seen as the "right" way to speak the language.

Related things I've learned after moving to US:

- If your accent is not noticable, people will assume you have native-like fluency, speak fast and use colloquialisms that you may have trouble understanding. Try to work on comprehension at least as much as accent.

- Everyone in the English-speaking world has an accent anyways. Californians don't speak like Texans, English don't speak like Scottish, there are people throughout the former Commonwealth that speak a version of English that is what "native" means in their country but sounds like acquired language to others.

- When speaking with people who lack fluency in comprehension, better to speak their language if you can, even if you struggle with it. They will have less trouble detecting your incorrect expression. Too often, people who lack fluency in comprehension are afraid to say they don't understand.

Also the complete lack of critical thinking in tech journalism. Just a few years back reputable publications heaped praise on SBF as it was fashionable to jump on the crypto miracle bandwagon. Now it's fashionable to jump on the crypto crookery bandwagon. As an industry, it seems to just play to and reinforce the readership's prevailing biases. It's a good case for why reading tech journalism is a waste of time with very little net insight gain coming from it.

In the early stages of product dev I tend to do direct customer interaction (user research, customer troubleshooting, frontline support), instead of farming it out to junior team members the way I do with more mature products. This gives me a deeper sense of what users think about our product.

Works!

[EDIT: Fixed] I know you didn't mean this but the browser history trapping on every keystroke felt kind of abusive on mobile. Thanks for the fix.

Without the hardware limitations, is that different from just making videos?

I never stopped :) both at work and outside.

I was introduced to the scene at 15 and was active in it until about 17. Too young to travel to proper demo parties, but old enough to contribute code and music, and to enjoy the demo disks that came in the mail after a swap party.

It's interesting to rationalize it as an art form today. It sounds reasonable, but I don't think I or my friends thought of what we were doing as art, at the time. We were trying to impress each other with things that looked cool. To the extent that art was involved, yes, we needed music and graphics and fonts and creative designs, but we did these things out of necessity, without calling ourselves composers or graphic artists or type designers or art directors. Watching what others sent you and contributing your own stuff created a sense of belonging which I feel was really the primary motivator for my friends and me.

Regarding tools, there was one thing that was frowned upon in my circles: the use of demomaker software. These point and click apps allowed people to call themselves demo makers even though they did nothing technical. Boo!

You can wrap search terms in quotes for exact results

In the country applying export sanctions, what companies draw short-term benefits? Usually most commercial actors would rather be able to export anything anywhere.

> more work was shifted to be done in the restricted country

Yes and it cost them more overall. People who design sanctions know well that they provide a powerful incentive to the development of indigenous alternatives in the target country. The calculus is that on balance, it is more desirable to force the target country to waste their resources on catching up (or on circumventing sanctions). The point is to make things more expensive.