apparent

I'm not seeing any evidence that she was an early Amazon investor. Where is that claim from? Of course she was an investor through her marriage, but you claim she'd be a billionaire without the divorce, so presumably you're referring to investment other than through her husband.

> Yeah, I can skip forward 30 sec, then back up, blech. It's just not worth it when you constantly have to interact with the podcast app.

Fortunately this can be done much more easily now, with headphone-based controls and smartwatch-based controls. It takes maybe 1-3 seconds for me to get through an ad break and be back to listening.

> The company terminated her in June 2023 after two more incidents, including a sarcastic allusion to an Atlassian founder’s partial ownership of the Utah Jazz basketball team. “Just dialling in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummelled,” she wrote.

Yeah this comment seems rude and without much substantive value. I would not want someone with this attitude and sense of decorum to work at my company, regardless of whether I believed in the causes that they advocated for. It's just a cheap shot, and not especially funny or insightful.

The company claims they had rules against this type of comment, and that's why she was fired:

> Atlassian argued that it had fired Ms. Unterwurzacher for violating company rules that require employees to behave civilly and avoid ad hominem attacks against one another.

Seems like a case like this could be overturned on appeal, if what they say is true. Also depends on what else she said, which the article doesn't mention.

> Tesla’s coming Cybercab, a two-door, two-seat car without a steering wheel or pedals, seems built for this. It can respond to hand signals from a police officer, according to a document Tesla published in June. Waymo vehicles are also programmed to pull over at the sight of a cop car’s lights, and they offer a means to speak with a human representative of their companies.

I wonder how they determine what a police person should look like. Do they respond to FBI or other federal law enforcement? Plainclothes officers with badges? Not that humans are infallible in this regard, but it seems like a tricky thing to get machines to do, especially if the machine is to then obey whatever orders are given by the officer. If a cop tells a Waymo to drive off a bridge, presumably it wouldn't do it? But what if the Waymo was empty and an ambulance needed to get past in order to rush the occupant to the hospital?

Ah, somehow I missed that even though it was included in the quote I copied. Thanks!

>In its lawsuit Friday, Apple accused Tang Tan, OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and a former Apple executive, of coaching his hires from Apple on how to evade Apple’s security processes for departing employees.

The word "coaching" is very malleable, and could refer to perfectly legal conduct, or conduct that is illegal, unethical, or both. How would an OpenAI employee know what Apple's security processes for departing employees are? One would assume he was told by previously-departed Apple employees. Would they have been forbidden to disclose information about the outgoing process? I would think so, given how careful Apple is about these things.

> Apple accused another former employee, Chang Liu, of using a former colleague’s Apple-owned laptop to access and download technical documents while working at OpenAI. Mr. Liu told that Apple employee what information about unannounced products she should study before job interviews, Apple said.

I would be very hesitant to assist a former colleague who is still at Apple in this way. Apple is well known for using deliberate leaks to smoke out leakers, and it would be easy for them to get a current/loyal employee to go through the interview process at a competitor for the purpose of finding out if the competitor is trying to get Apple employees to act unethically/illegally.

EDIT: I see my comment, which I posted on the HN thread for an NYT article, has been merged into the comment section of a different article, and is now being downvoted a bunch. Please understand I did not post this comment here, so if it seems out of place that's why.

> prefer your own flashcards to other people’s flashcards, at least for fields that require deep understanding

For me, much of the value of flashcards comes in the making of them. Part of it is thinking about what each flashcard will say, and part of it is the action of writing it down in handwriting.

I think the relevant comparison is the developer beta, which has access to the Gemini-powered Siri that will roll out publicly later this year. From the reviews I've seen, Apple won't be "years behind" (which surely they were) for long.

I agree that a company in growth mode needs more employees than one in maintenance mode. But wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?

Weird, I never get spam from Substacks. I do get them from beehive or whatever it's called. Even asked to have my work email blocked, since if I ever signed up it would be from a personal address. They claimed to have done it, but I still get spammed.

> Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket.

The risk with Substack seems much lower though, since you get to keep their email addresses and could export to another system if you become unhappy with Substack's methods in the future.

With FB, you didn't have email addresses, or a way to export your follower list to another platform, so the consequence of the platform misbehaving was much worse (which perhaps made it more likely the platform would misbehave, knowing that there were no escape hatches).

Sounds like Social Security.

Yes, it is part of cutting costs, but there are other ways to cut costs ("synergies" from merging back office functions) that don't necessarily affect the product.

> There are ~350,000,000 of us. When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that.

Less than half are net income tax payers, IIRC. So if you pay income tax, you're actually on the hook for more $6, on average.

Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.

> cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.

Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".

Yeah, if there are multiple items to address, I tend to use bulleted lists and then end the email with "What do you think?"

I find that making the very last sentence a question makes it much more likely that I'll get a response than if the question is anywhere else in the email. The person needs to finish reading the email with the question, which prompts them to hit reply and answer it.

The immediate-response-rate goes down even more if the input being sought is not framed as a question ("I've been trying to figure out how to handle this situation" versus "Which do you think is the better route?").

Of course, some people will still respond regardless, but I've found that in both personal and business emails, keeping an email short and finishing with a question mark is the best way to ensure a rapid response.

There's actually some different content covered later in the article, but yes it is quite long. I'm sure plenty of people consume articles like these by asking LLMs for a summary.

Nit picking around the edges doesn't undermine the general point. The comparisons were bad. You have succeeded in pointing out that they were not as bad as they possibly could have been, which I guess makes you feel good? Anyway, I'll leave it here since I don't enjoy engaging with people like you on HN.

> Yes, but do you only do things for pleasure if they're done quickly? Is your sex always over in a minute?

This is a valid critique, but the motivations are not the same for reading books and gambling. Both are done partly for entertainment, but reading is partly for edification whereas gambling is partly for making money (in theory, at least). People want to make money almost universally, whereas ongoing edification is something that people do not enjoy intrinsically (meaning they would do it less if it takes more time).

> Yes, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a different measure than "placed a bet last year", but "read a book of any kind in 2022" is the same length of time, though not the exact same year.

I critiqued the two comparisons separately for a reason. One conflated a time-consuming activity with a quick one, and the other conflated time periods of comparison. I do not claim that both critiques apply to both cases, just that each comparison is flawed.

It's not a hard and fast rule, for sure. But we have heard from many boy parents who wish their boys read more (or much at all). We, OTOH, have to tell our girls to put their books down and do something else from time to time.

Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.

Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.

Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.

> Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.

This is not a fair comparison:

> Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".

Never thought I'd see the day the NYT editorial board take this stance. Not because it's extreme in any way, but because it is fundamentally at odds with the belief that racially disparate outcomes must be the result of intentional racism.

They let Janet Napolitano off easy though. No follow up question after she admits that her decision was wrong?

Is this referring to recalls related to defective vehicles? Also, EVs are on average much newer than ICE vehicles. I would assume that most ICE vehicles that spontaneously combust are not newer ones.

Weird that the journo wasn't able to find anyone for the article who fits the narrative better. Instead, it just comes across as failure to launch.