Traster

At the end of the day it's obviously the right decision to fire him. You can't drop your ethics when you feel sick.

Seems strange that they're releasing new Macbook pros now we now that they'll be legacy products with the Macbook neos.

I think this is... fine? Am I just totally naive. I think it's fine to say "You don't really have privacy on this app" - as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are). TikTok is really a public by default type of social media, there's not much idea of mutual following or closed groups. So sure, you don't have privacy on tiktok, if you want it you can move to snapchat or signal or whatever platform of your choice.

Like, it's literally a platform that was run under the watchful eye of the CCP, and now the US version is some kleptocratic nightmare, so I just don't see the point in expecting some sort of principled stance out of them.

In some ways I think it's worse for places like Facebook to "care about privacy" and use E2EE but then massively under-resource policing of CSAM on their platform. If you're going to embrace 'privacy' I do think it's on you to also then put additional resources into tackling the downsides of that.

On the broader point, I think it's right to say that OpenAI has challenges. It simply has no differentiation beyond branding and arguably there are quite a few obvious ways it messed up and lost momentum (the board fight, trying to go in every direction at once etc.)

Today you have a phone in your pocket and you have apps on your home screen. Facebook is on your home screen, Whatsapp or X or Bluesky or whatever have a place on your home screen. Google basically is the safari app on iPhone. I don't know how many people have ChatGPT on their home screen. And soon, there will be some AI in your home screen from Apple (served by Google or another big hitter)that will be an incredible advantage.

That means OpenAI either needs to build up history with users very quickly and use that as stickiness before Apple nukes that distribution. Or they need to find a way of being another device that every living person has in their pocket.

Every attempt at doing that so far has been a comical failure and the way OpenAI are behaving makes me think their attempt will be no different.

This is the case in all layoffs. Is there a bottom 10% of employees at OpenAI? By definition yes. If you do your absolute best to try and make redundant the bottom 10% of employees at OpenAI, how many of them do you think will actually be in the bottom 10%? I bet it's not all of them, it's probably not even close to half of them.

First you've got the good people who don't like the environment, they'll bite your arm off for the redundancy, then you've got the people who are doing fine but for whatever reason are happy enough to take their chances elsewhere, they'll be happy to be top of the redundancy list. Then you've got the good strong performer who pissed off the wrong person, they'll be on the list too. Then you've got the entire team that is really good and hardworking but senior management figure it's easy to just cut the entire team because their project isn't politically valuable. Before you know it the redundancy list is full and it has no correlation to the bottom 10% of performers, but because it's pretty much an almost random sample it does reduce your company's capability by 10%.

Implied in your statement - it benefits those who can create more complex financial situations. Often the complexity of the situation is largely synthetic.

I don't know if it's different in the US, but in the UK "Took responsibilty" meant resigned (or used to). Like if something really bad happens and you're the one taking responsibily- you're the one falling on your sword. It doesn't actually have to be your fault even, something could happen that you thought was below your pay grade, but that's why you're paid - to take responsibility. The reporter taking responsibility is... whining about COVID? Ok and next week is he going to fabricate quotes because he was hungover? or tired? Why didn't he resign? Since he didn't resign, why wasn't he fired? It's almost like he was doing what he was meant to be doing, but wasn't meant to be caught.

I actually disagree with Shambaugh. I think Ars is already breaking the way our media is meant to work, they know the steps to go through and so they cynically go through them in the full knowledge they haven't actually put in place any mechanisms to stop it happening again. It's a theoretical risk that Ars' reputation suffers, but it's a financial risk this week if they get fewer page views by publishing fewer higher quality articles and Conde Nast isn't in the business of making smart long term decisions about digital media.

I just want to point out this isn't an agents thing. The world is full of people fucking bumbling around doing the stupidest stuff with no feedback thinking they're amazing. It's only through interaction with others does this stuff get caught and often, even then, their unfounded confidence let's them get away with dumb stuff. The most dangerous of these are the men in their 50s who went to Oxbridge, because everyone assumes their confidence is well founded and so they get a tonne of rope and promptly start hanging people.

I said in earlier reports about this, it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons with humans because there's so little data. Having said that, it is clear that this system just isn't ready and it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car.

In some spaces we still have rule of law - when xAI started doing the deepfake nude thing we kind of knew no one in the US would do anything but jurisdictions like the EU would. And they are now. It's happening slowly but it is happening. Here though, I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.

What I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.).

That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces.

What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.

This is something that has made no sense to me for a while. Trump has done a very good job at telling the EU that the US will no longer back stop their security, and that they need to start taking care of that themselves.

Now, obviously the US very much likes the idea of selling a bunch of extremely profitable military and intelligence solutions to the EU, but it makes 0 sense.

If the US isn't backing the EU's security, and in some cases may actually be on the other side of a conflict, then it's insane for the EU to be dependent on US defence companies.

They have to bring this all local. We saw this early in the Ukraine war where significant amounts of resources got tied up in complex arrangements where the country that manufactured the equipment had a veto over whether the country who owned the equipment could provide it to Ukraine.

Firstly, OpenAI has lacked focus so they're pursuing lots of different paths despite the obvious one (ads in chatgpt), like hiring Johnny Ive - a move that feels more WeWork than anything.

But secondly, personal agents can be great for OpenAI, if the user isn't even interacting with the AI and is just letting it go off autonously then you're basically handing your wallet to the AI, and if the model underlying that agent is OpenAI, you're handing your wallet to them.

Imagine for a second that a load of stuff is now being done through personal agents, and suddenly OpenAI release an API where vendors can integrate directly with the OpenAI agent. If OpenAI control that API and control how people integrate with it, there's a potential there that OpenAI could become the AppStore for AI, capturing a slice of every penny spent through agents. There's massive upside to this possibility.

It really is quite funny though isn't it. Yes, it's a fucking hand grenade that will blow up at any moment. It's perfect for a one man band startup. Because there's massive upside and at the end of the day if it blows up he's just back to sqaure one, what did you expect from a 1 man band.

But wait. Here he comes. Hero of the hour. Sam Altman.

Let's take that wildly dangerous, lightly thought through product, and give it the backing of the leading AI lab. Let's take all that pending liability and slap it straight onto the largest private company in AI.

For me the advantage of using digital journalling is it's easier to switch between multiple threads. It means if I have 3 tasks to complete, I can switch tabs to the notes on the new task without thinking about the physical limitations of a notebook.

This can be an incredibly powerful tool. It does so many things - it forces you to write down what you're doing. If you actually do that, it's just a great opportunity to think "Hey hang on, is this thing I'm doing actually solving the problem I have" and "Actually is this the most useful thing I could be doing" in an explicit way. Another thing that the author doesn't really mention but actually is really useful for some of us is to go back and read what you've done to (a) not feel like you've been wasting your time doing nothing, and (b) to realise where you were going wrong on this line of reasoning earlier.

Personally I think this is a really useful time to be revisiting the concept because this is how a lot AI tools work. They're language models so the way they get to complexity is through writing out plans step by step and running commands and then interpreting them, you can read your session with an AI agent like claude code as their engineering notebook.

Well there's a good reason that OpenAI partnered up with Microsoft. The calculation is that the established big techs - Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta are all going to be significantly impacted by AI so it's not unreasonable to look at Anthropic at 10% of their market cap as a reasonable value. Would it be worth Apple to bring Anthropic in house? They failed to deliver AI themselves, they know the risks of being dependent on Google. If AI goes far enough it may totally remove Apple's differentiation.

Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.

Running into traffic to pick a fight with them? Throwing your bike in front of their car to cause a collision? Jumping onto their bonnet to try and pretend you're being run over?

The guy is quite literally taking the law into his own hands and it's very clear that running around trying to cause car accidents is making people less safe, not more. In many cases the "accident" he claims to want to prevent is caused by his actions.

Does anyone have any tips on how I would fundamentally understand this article without just going back to school and getting a degree in mathematics? This is the sort of article where my attempts to understand a term only ever increase the number of terms I don't understand.

It is very re-assuring to know, on a post where I can essentially not even speak the language (despite a masters in engineering) HN is still just discussing the first paragraph of the post.

In future, if you think he's on the right side, link to the video of him doing it, not an 8 minute video talking around the fact he did it. There was no reason for the bicycle to enter the carriage way other than to come directly into the path of the vehicle. People think there's some sort of "Oh well if what you're doing isn't following the highway code then I can do ANYTHING and you're at fault" attitude, and it just isn't true. The driver shouldn't have gone that direction and Mikey shouldn't have caused the crash.

People shouldn't break the law while driving. What Cycling Mikey is doing is ill-advised and dangerous.

So, in general, you support vigilantes?

Yeah this is the animosity I'm talking about. I'd just point out that this also translates to drivers showing that animosity to cyclists on the streets in London.

Since this site has a very international audience, it's quite important to make clear: there's not some road safety inspired reason for this. Mickey is an adrenaline junky who loves to start fights in public and he's found a way to do that in a mostly legal way. Sometimes, a little less legal, like when he lept onto the bonnet of a car in order to feign he'd been run over, or when he threw his bicycle into the path of an oncoming car endangering pretty much everyone in the situation (interestingly, a situation in which the author of this article seems to imply the car was to blame, not Mikey for deliberately throwing his bike into the path of the car, calculatingly not actually throwing himself into the path).

The guy has got sucked into a sort of spiral where he's going out to create these confrontations (partly to monetize on youtube), and he will, eventually cause some serious harm to himself or someone else. This article kind of misses that this isn't a story about road safety, it's more a story about how people can self-radicalise and how social media has created a profit incentive for them to do so.

It's difficult to watch a motorist threaten to take his own life if this guy reports him and then remember that actually, that's happening for ad revenue.

I guess there's two ways of looking at this, way (1) is leaning heavily into what seems at least seems to be top of cycle in a cyclical business, which is likely to be highly problematic when they hit downturn, or (2) doing an Amazon and getting lucky by having a massive war chest to survive the next down turn.

I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation.

The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker.

A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.

It's very clear that at some point they decided stalks are bad, and so instead of having an indicator stalk - a universally understood control they decided to stick them all on the steering wheel so you can drive around looking at whether you want to be in Range, Tour or "Perfo" mode.

I clearly don't understand Design. My expectation is that an amazing prolific designer would deliver different designs in different contexts. At Apple maybe it's this minimalist industrial design. But what I'm seeing here - and forgive me if I'm just an idiot about design, is exactly what you'd get it you asked ChatGPT "Ferrari but Johnny Ive apple design interior".

It's all the same design language and materials you'd seen on Apple product. It's almost like someone went "let's make the infotainment a giant Apple watch".

I would expect you call up a good designer and they design something special that works in the language of your product, something uniquely new, but also uniquely Ferrari. But what seems to be happening here is if you phone up Johnny Ive you'll get a slapdash re-run of 2010s iPhone design.

I'm british so I apprecitate this condition, we need to talk down, we need to down play. An American will celebrate an LLM surprising them, a brit will be disappointed - until an LLM suprises by failing and then we'll be delighted.

There's a lot of hand wringing about how far wrong LLMs can go, but can we be serious for a second, if you're running <whatever the name is now>, you're tech savvy and bear the consequences. This isn't simple child abuse like teenage girls on facebook.

There is a reason people are buying mac minis for this and it's cool. We really need to be more excited by opportunity, not threatened.

To be honest, I would rather the author be put in a box he seems grumpy.

Thanks for this, it's really important to reflect the fact that aside from anything else, the common law tradition practiced in most anglophone countries is fundamentally at odds with a lot of European countries.