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high_derivative

2,859 karma · joined January 2, 2019

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high_derivative··on OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors
Just stopping by to say that this type of post is absolutely obnoxious and embarrassing for you.
high_derivative··on Microsoft tried to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, according to Google court filings
I don't think you are entirely wrong, but it's also not as simple that every tech company can do everything well.

Apple has not been able to make Siri work well and has completely fallen behind on AI/LLMs.

Apple has been trying to build a car for a decade and restarted/rebuilt teams many times with layoffs in between.

Not every culture can support every product

high_derivative··on Alaska Airlines is grounding all Boeing 737-9 aircraft after window blowout
I am avoiding flying Boeing ... as if my life depended on it
high_derivative··on Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns
You cannot have it both ways. Universities get billions in public funding and then turn around using that money to fund political activists masquerading as academics. Disciplines like sociology are now very open about the fact that academics need to be openly activist to advance. It's disingenuous to then complain about political pressure.
high_derivative··on Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns
It's quite apparent from everything that has come to light that she got tenured for the same reason she got to be Harvard president. Merit was not one of the reasons.
high_derivative··on Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns
Unfortunately, nothing will change until the system that produced this changes too. No doubt she will retain her tenured position.
high_derivative··on [dead]
There is a certain type of ex-software founder who likes the pose of philosopher king. They like to describe themselves as 'first principles thinker' but have never engaged in serious thinking since nobody challenges them on anything.

They often end up funding non-profits on AI policy, criminal justice or education reform with absolutely disastrous consequences for everyone who is not able to economically insulate themselves from the fallout. Typically, the things they end up funding espouse principles that fly in the face of everything that made them or their parents rich in the first place.

Everything I have seen and heard in interviews from this guy gives me this impression.

high_derivative··on US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
Apple loves to bully competitors and suppliers with both patents and app store. I doubt being on the other end of this will make them change their behaviour.
high_derivative··on Lina Khan's Rough Year Running the Federal Trade Commission
A cynic might say the Biden administration precisely achieved its goal. Appoint someone progressive with the right optics who has zero experience getting things done or governing in a larger organization. Gets nothing done. Corporate donors are happy.
high_derivative··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Could be a good bet, very asymmetric. The question to me is if the execs are leaving because they know Cruise doesn't have it technically and the jig is up, or if it's really more temporary. Hard to know from the outside. It's also hard to translate Cruise's much worse human-intervention numbers (vs Waymo) into a quantative measure of 'behindness' in terms of how difficult it is to catch up.

That's why it could be a good bet. Or not.

high_derivative··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
For one, Cruise has essentially disintegrated over the past few months? All key execs left https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/general-motors-cruise-executi..., massive layoffs, founders left.

Cruise is done.

high_derivative··on Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?
It is absolutely True that most larger tech companies could run much leaner. Almost all projects that are done by many cross functional teams with lots of coordination overhead could be done by a small team of effective senior engineers.

Middle management, project/product empires mostly increase overheads with sublinear increase in output.

high_derivative··on According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar was once captured by pirates
Are you thinking of Robert Jordan / The Wheel of Time? Robert Harris is alive and writing
high_derivative··on Scientists rewrites assumptions about a gendered prehistoric division of labor
"We recognize that biological sex can be defined using multiple characteristics, including chromosomes, genitalia and hormones, each of which exists on a spectrum."

Is this the new land acknowledgement statement for biology? 'biological sex' exists on a spectrum?

high_derivative··on Pi.ai LLM Outperforms Palm/GPT3.5
We are not the audience. The VCs they are trying to raise the next megaround from are
high_derivative··on Segment Anything Model (SAM) can "cut out" any object in an image
n=1 (as a mid-profile AI researcher), but for me it's working in terms of Meta gaining my respect by open sourcing (despite the licensing disasters). They clearly seem to be more committed to open source and getting things done now in general.
high_derivative··on Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students
But...that was exactly the purpose? To be able to more freely select amongst racial and gender lines as desired
high_derivative··on Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare
Let's just be honest about CloudFlare. They write these hand-wringing posts occasionally to try to justify their 'policies', but their policy is quite literally 'block someone if enough people demand it on twitter'.
high_derivative··on Head of Design at Dropbox descriminates in her hiring based on skin color
>I understand the importance of diversity, inclusivity and equal-opportunities etc.

'Hail to the king / our glorious leader / the church / - with that out of the way, ...'

high_derivative··on Launch HN: OneChronos (YC S16) – Combinatorial auctions market for US equities
How is your team organized? Is it US only or are there international/remote roles?
high_derivative··on Ask HN: General Mood of the Community
I am far from left leaning (in the sense of American progressive left, I am an immigrant and not in the US), and I find this actually to be wrong. I think hn is far more balanced politically than reddit or twitter.
high_derivative··on Is America’s Biggest NFT Full of Alt-Right Red Flags?
And these alt-right flags, are they in the room with us right now?
high_derivative··on An ad plugin was stealing revenue for a year and I didn't even notice
Stealing seems an almost libellous term for using a software with a revenue model the author did not bother checking out.
high_derivative··on Hellofresh employees' open salary initiative
I don't understand how this is different in any way from bands which employees are placed in based on performance? Im not trying to be combative, I genuinely do not see how this would realize any different outcomes. It just seems to shift definitions around.

If employees A and B both are in the same band, both do not get promoted in a year, but have different performance ratings, I assume they will end up with different 'performance based pay' raises. Where is the difference to moving them to a different place in the band?

high_derivative··on President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment
We are not doing adults any favours by infantilising them at university. It's a big part of the problem related to contemporary college culture.
high_derivative··on Robert Bly has died
Thank you for this. The NYT is just hopeless now. They cannot even write an obituary without weaving in all their culture war angles.
high_derivative··on Google reorg moves AR, VR, Starline and Area 120 into new ‘Labs’ team
Frankly, a problem at Google is that they have a lot of VPs with very long tenures (15+ years) who are simply in these positions because they have been along for the ride.

In other places they would long have been fired for underperforming, at Google they get to keep messing up because core business is performing too well.

high_derivative··on How much of your money goes to Jeff Bezos?
You want to seriously get access to people's plain text gmails?

Is this a joke?

high_derivative··on Steve Klabnik is no longer involved with the book The Rust Programming Language
Can someone give context on this?
high_derivative··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
I noticed there are bi-monthly long-haul trips mentioned in the advert. Does everyone have to attend?
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