yafbum

There's another similar thing needing correction, which is that the LEDs near the center sweep a much smaller volume than the ones at the edge, and should be dimmed in order to yield equivalent luminance. LEDs describing tiny circles very close to the center would need to be dimmed a lot since they'd essentially be stationary. Wouldn't it be better then to sweep slightly larger circles at the middle anyways?

Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.

Looking at other comments, evidently a lot of HN readers didn't!

The title is misleading without context. TFA doesn't argue that RTO is a bad policy or is being abandoned. It only presents facts showing that the post-COVID RTO trend is flatlining, i.e. employees aren't currently RTO'ing any more or any less than they were last month (as a share of paid work days).

Time zones are geopolitical artifacts just like borders, laws, currencies, etc. They can't really be "permanent"...

People need to stop using data as an excuse for making decisions, or apologizing for not having data, or arguing about the lack of data as an excuse for maintaining a status quo. As entrepreneurs, as managers, as individuals we make decisions with no perfect data all the time. It's called dealing with risk.

Sure you could get a sense for how much active coding time or whatever BS metric you can track, and look at correlation with WFH, but that stuff is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. How's new grad onboarding affected? How's team culture and conflict management affected? How is dealing with difficult health challenges affected? Working remotely is a big shift with likely long term longitudinal effects on an organization that are hard to predict. You can't A/B test or analyze your way out of every single decision there. So I respect people making decisions without data on this, that's what they're being paid the big bucks for. As I'm sure they will respect my decision to leave the minute the terms of the arrangement no longer suits me, which will add a data point of N=+1 somewhere.

It's ok to ask to see the data if you're curious. But people are often asking for data not out of curiosity but just because they disagree with the consequences of a decision that affects them. I think that's disingenuous. You could deploy a team of data scientists to tell me that the org will definitely be 5% more productive if everyone worked from some office an hour away, and it wouldn't really matter to me. I still prefer having a remote work option and I won't commute more than 40 min to work. We don't need to ask for data about things we don't like, we can just disagree and either commit or create the attrition outcomes that will drive different behaviors in the future.

I'm not sure this doesn't just lead to blind rubber-stamping unless this is done very very rarely

I'm sure there's plenty of local enforcement, I'm just talking about my own cookie wall experience which is mostly happening when consuming Europe-based news outlets. I was really surprised to see that it was enabled by some national agencies which have explicitly okayed the cookie wall for such cases.

News outlets based in Europe routinely pull this cookie wall crap. I guess they get a pass for very very principled reasons and not just because they are based in Europe whereas Facebook isn't... /s

Banging Facebook over the head might make Facebook suffer, but it isn't going to create an alternative privacy-conscious social network, or even the incentives to the existence of such an alternative. It's just going to further add cost to a bunch of properties that might have once been dominant and hegemonic, but aren't anymore (hello tiktok) and destroy value that would otherwise have accrued, primarily, to advertisers whose ads now will be much more crappily targeted.

Yeah but in these kinds of big companies there are supposedly compensation "bands" by technical level. When salaries within each band are very different, it can be an impediment to talent mobility within the company.

Nonprofit status relates to the absence of investor payouts, and doesn't fundamentally have much to do with pay levels. Some employees can be on occasion willing to accept lower pay when the motives are altruistic, but most employees at nonprofits are paid (have to be paid) market rate.

They didn't say they were going to Microsoft, as far as I can tell. I presume many can get golden offers anywhere including academia and other institutions with stronger nonprofit governance track record.

The premise of founding OpenAI as a nonprofit with "nobler" goals than making money was that it would be a strong magnet to the right talent. Going to work for Microsoft (or any other tech company for that matter), from that point of view, is like crossing over to the dark side of the force. It will be interesting to see how many of OpenAI's employees were there because of its nonprofit status, and how many were there in spite of it.

TL;DR: The emperor has no clothes, and the OpenAI board are just a bunch of clowns.

The issue is not that talent will defect, but that it will spoil into an unproductive vortex.

While it is true that the govt looks to keep such engagements short, SVB absolutely did not shutter. It was taken over in a weekend and its branches were open for business on Monday morning. It was later sold, and depositors kept all their money in the process.

Maybe for another, longer lived example, see AIG.

You are maybe mistaking nationalization for civil servant status. The government routinely takes over organizations without touching pay (recent example: Silicon Valley Bank)

Waiting for US govt to enter the chat. They can't let OpenAI squander world-leading tech and talent; and nationalizing a nonprofit would come with zero shareholders to compensate.

I believe it's operating by the mantra of "doing the things that don't scale"

Yes, market conditions and competitor landscape are a big factor too.

> 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.