Such fond memories. So many OS reinstalls after inadvertently
infecting my computer from a sketchy photoshop crack. You learn to never get too attached.
3,742 karma · joined March 1, 2011
Whenever an issue involves people, slack simply won't suffice. There's too much good will lost on either side. "No worries if not [grumble grumble]!"
This isn't procedural, like sending an invoice to the wrong email address. This is a vp overstepping and threatening the success of another employee. They know what they're doing.
I do see mention of "making the world a better place," but that's a bit like saying "our company exists to generate revenue." That's everyone. What makes you, YOU?
You're chasing extremely niche problems, that, sure, may be real, but there is no examination of what those problems stack up to that would necessitate years of dedication.
It's no surprise, then, that these pivots feel more like whack a mole than company operation.
That's incredibly depressing, because after five years, you can't look back and say "how far did we move the needle against the mission?"
This is good management?
You can almost see how a toxic workplace experience seeped into OP's world model.
People just want to feel heard. Show up to listen, zoom out to be strategic, think about the mission.
This thing just needed to work once, in whatever way it could be hacked together. And the player never knows the difference! Beautiful.
Model collapse is a phenomenon where machine learning models gradually degrade due to errors coming from -uncurated training on the outputs- of another model, such as prior versions of itself.
Chef's kiss that this article, and the accompanying graphic, were AI generated.
What made previous Punkt models cool is that they were "dumb+" phones. They did what you needed them to, and nothing else. In exchange, you got a device that fit easily in your pocket.
Now that it's a big touch screen, you've got apps, complexity, and ultimately no differentiator from any other smartphone.
The rest is insurance.
Respect to the man for running an operation for 60 years. That's a helluva feat that deserves a lot of admiration.
Still surprised at HN's glazing of someone whose life's mission was to make a number go up and to the right via insurance packages.
Maybe in that case, the thing to change your relationship with is yourself, and how you view your contributions to the world.
The code is irrelevant. The thinking behind the code is the valuable thing.
For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter.
It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training expense is not real.
There is no shortage of data a company has at its disposal these days and a CEO will bias towards what they feel they are best at. We see that with Steve Jobs versus Tim Cook. Tim loves seeing numbers go up into the right, so that's where the passion is in the company these days. An AI CEO that could not only balance that out but cancel it out could be a real strength.
The human ceo would still be indispensable in setting the company vision, and defining its culture and values; crucial ingredients for execution.
We now see every war, cyber incident, threat, and speech in real time. I have to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis (for example) was a much more serious existential risk, we were just largely in the dark while it was happening.
Not to minimize the current crises, I just wonder if this isn't what has always happened, we're just more informed now.
For example, layoffs feel "icky" and are almost always the right business decision.
Other "violations": NASA existing at all; early COVID lockdowns; Tesla remaining solvent; the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Ultimately, you can't judge whether a decision was good/bad until time passes. What you can do at the point of decision is ask yourself if it believably steps towards mission fulfillment, and if it reflects your values.
If one of your values is "be an asshole," then a good decision is the one that a really good asshole would make, not one that an asshole-who-is-trying-really hard-not-to-be-an-asshole would.
For the soft CEO skills, not so much.
Not that that's a deal-breaker. I have a vision of an AI CEO couched as a "strategic thought partner," which the wet-CEO just puppets to grease the skids of acceptance among the employees.
I'd fully trust an AI CEO's decision making, for a predictable business, at least. But some CEOs get paid a lot (deservedly so) because they can make the right decisions in the thick fog of war. Hard to get an AI to make the right decision on something that wasn't in the training corpus.
Still, business strategy isn't as complex as picking winners in the stock market.
Stephen Lemay, Dye's replacement, has been at Apple since 1999, yet was passed over for the design lead position multiple times. There's a reason.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It was post-Cold War and central banks were trimming USD reserves to test alternatives.
Then, crises hit (tequila, Asian, Russian, dot com) and the world reconsolidated around USD, thanks to the immense strength of the Federal Reserve and IMF.
Similarly now, reserve share is falling as countries hedge sanctions and geopolitics, yet dollar usage in trade, debt, and crisis funding remains dominant, and unless a true full-stack alternative (liquidity, safety, yield, and crisis response) emerges, history will repeat.
Makes me wonder: is this just an artifact of the world being relatively "stable" right now?