occamsrazorwit

> The creator of OpenClaw made this I believe: https://clawd.rip

FWIW, it's from an AI chatbot company.

https://twitter.com/theo/status/2048628814755012945

"15 years ago" is funny, because Siri couldn't even do either of those functions on desktop 7 years ago [1]. It's crazy how they've managed to do nothing with a winning hand.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9q7ugf/it_is_truly_absur...

> Perhaps there is more damning evidence.

Do you consider the announcement from her publisher that she admitted that she plagiarized passages as a damning response or damning evidence?

It's also not just her wealth but her personality. For better or for worse, someone as headstrong as her attracts a certain type of person, and the article showed that even her own husband was afraid of getting involved...

> Bi’s husband focused on stabilizing the family, a move he credits with saving their marriage. He blamed the hospital, not Smith, but told me that the litigation is “her grieving process.” He tried to stay out of the legal stuff so that Bi couldn’t blame him too.

I honestly feel bad for the family, because I've heard many stories about this type of familial dynamic from children who grew up inside them...

It doesn't have to be the whole world, just their inner circle. If people are that reluctant to admit fault (50 times!), then that's a dismal statement on how often we see truth in society overall.

Cluely should reach out to him for a sponsorship deal.

Yeah, I'm surprised someone who's been working at over 50 companies in only 3 years wasn't caught sooner. Some of the stories are wild enough that they had to have been shared with others at the time.

I've always been suspicious about how many brand-name products that I wouldn't give a second thought about in a store were marked as D or F.

10+9

He's 7.

How would you describe the local cultural opportunities in your area?

I don't want to sound like I'm victim-blaming here, but the reality is there's no free lunch. Investments are not risk-free, and, as you've discovered, there's a reason you got these properties at such a low cost. It seems like your real estate situation can't go on like this forever, right?

> selling my properties would be a ruinous move letting go of my most valuable assets that are the only toe hold I have in this economy, and may threaten my ability to become a homeowner potentially ever again, depending on how this economic future plays out.

Despite these negatives, it's possible that selling is the financially-smart thing to do. Keeping your properties may also be a ruinous move that could cost your ability to become a homeowner ever again. It's unfortunate, but it sounds like you need to choose whichever is the lesser of two evils and stick with it.

> If i was bestowed some gift of capital, I could complete the renovations and make the house income-producing.

As an alternative, if this is actually true, then you'd be the perfect candidate for a loan against your house. People commonly get emotional around housing and debt, but there's no room for that when you're struggling to survive.

I know someone in the Bay Area AI-adjacent community who went through that exact rapidly-escalating psychotic break in a highly visible and well-documented fashion. This started last year, and he's now in jail. The risk only increases from here :/

The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.

While this is true, it's also funny to note that Apple was only founded in South Bay because Jobs and Wozniak wanted to be close to their families. There was already talent in the region, but the origin of that talent started the same way. Shockley (of Shockley Semiconductor and traitorous eight fame) moved the company from LA to South Bay to take care of his mother [1]. Silicon Valley is only Silicon Valley because of "I want to be with my parents" decisions.

[1] https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by...

In a way, this might end up being a blessing in disguise. It's an emergency drill for something potentially catastrophic (e.g. massive cyberattack, solar flare), and it's a large enough wake-up call that society can't just ignore it.

This is literally a black swan event that'll be memorialized in textbooks, and that's not even considering the actual fallout that will follow.

Whoops, I linked the wrong comment. I meant to link this one [1]. Anyway, seems like there's potentially a whole trail of compromised and fake accounts [2]. Someone in a government agency somewhere is pretty disappointed right now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39867593

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866936

Someone named "John is good" claims they aren't a malicious actor... You're trying real hard to convince us, huh.

What type of confirmation do you want? The documents aren't going to be declassified in the next couple of decades, if ever.

I've never heard anyone claim that Dual_EC_DRBG is most likely not intentionally backdoored, but there's literally no way to confirm because of how its written. If we can't analyze intention from the code, we can look at the broader context for clues. The NSA spent an unusual amount of effort trying to push forward an algorithm that kept getting shot down because it was slower than similar algorithms with no additional benefits (the $10 million deal specified it as a requirement [1]). If you give the NSA the benefit of the doubt, they spent a lot of time and money to... intentionally slow down random number generation?!

As an American, I'd prefer a competent NSA than an incompetent NSA that spends my tax dollars to make technology worse for literally no benefit...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9...

Given the details from another comment [1], it sounds like both maintainers are suspicious. Lasse's behavior has changed recently, and he's been pushing to get Jia Tan's changes into the Linux kernel. It's possible both accounts aren't even run by the original Lasse Collin and Jia Tan anymore.

Edit: Also, Github has suspended both accounts. Perhaps they know something we don't.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810#39866275

WSB has more actual discussion, while people mostly see /r/pics on their feed (because it's a default subreddit) or scroll through really quickly (because it's easily-consumable content).

That's a wall of text, but I think you're misreading the general context.

> this is happening just as news breaks about layoffs at CloudFlare.

Err, you have this backwards. The news broke that there weren't layoffs at CloudFlare (keep in mind, their spokesperson publicly stated this to the news, and there are legal consequences for lying about this). The CEO stated that <3% of the sales team was fired for not meeting standards, and that that's a normal rate for each quarter [1]. Sales in general is attrition-heavy, and rank-and-yank is a relatively common, if employee-unfriendly, strategy. So, yes, the former situation is much more likely when you strip out points 1 and 2, since points 3 and 4 correspond to each other and the latter situation is illegal in two different ways.

> it is common knowledge that layoffs are usually conducted as one massive group meeting with all parties at once

This is common knowledge? I've literally never heard of a layoff conducted like this, only the reverse. The major tech layoffs this week (Google, Twitch, Unity, Discord) were conducted in the reverse fashion.

> That's not me claiming that you're wrong, which would then require me to provide a reasonable argument. Instead, I leave you to wonder if I don't see the apparent contradiction, or if I do but I'm just not engaging with you for some reason, etc.

Occam's Razor: It's clearly a social problem, and it makes much more sense for it to be on one end than the other.

All HR has is a record saying that she was underperforming. HR doesn't know what went on in the meetings between the manager and their report. Even if they were to show her a piece of paper that says she was underperforming, you end up back at square one. There's obviously a paper trail (true or fabricated), and she doesn't believe what it says. The only person who could solve the problem is a person who isn't there.

> I don't see that as under-performing and then making an excuse for doing so

I was pulling in info from elsewhere in the thread where account executives were agreeing that that was under-performing. I'm not making that judgement call, as I've never worked in sales for B2B software.

> it would also be the height of cowardice for a boss to have someone else fire one of their reports for them.

This is my entire point. The difference between our opinions is that (to me) all the signs indicate that the manager fucked up. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

[1] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

Edit: TL;DR: Either it's a complex, multi-level conspiracy that's somewhat dysfunctional but not in a way that would lead to the conspiracy falling apart... or someone has a poor manager.

True, there are some very dysfunctional cases. In general though, if a manager disagrees strongly enough, they can protect their reports. Yes, it might impact their personal career, but it's weird to criticize HR for just following orders and not apply the same criticisms to the manager (something I'm seeing a lot of in these discussions). The manager is much more familiar with the laid-off employee, their work, and the criteria used to judge them. Ultimately, the manager has much more final say than HR people who are essentially just messengers to shield management.

To continue the dubious analogy, having too many girlfriends isn't a sufficient cause by itself. There's a metric used to determine which girlfriend is dumped, and that's the real reason that specific relationship ends.

> She established that her supervisor's feedback for her was that she had done "a great job". If that was not the case, the people letting her go would have asserted that this claim is false.

FWIW, the HR people did assert this claim was false but said they weren't able to go into specifics. That's the central issue that makes this somewhat murky. If companies prioritized employee wellbeing, then they'd release this information, but they prioritize not getting sued or opening themselves up to criticism.

Honestly, I think the manager deserves more criticism here. There's a world where both sides are telling the truth. It's pretty common for managers to give positive feedback to underperforming employees (as part of empathetic communication). Also, managers do have a say in layoffs. The excuse is always that managers didn't know until right before the layoffs, but they still have input at that stage. They're not laying people off or firing them behind the manager's back.

Edit: I'd also point out that she says she's been receiving positive feedback despite not meeting standards. Her reasons for such are that one deal died through no fault of her own and that the holidays are tough for deal-making. She is making the argument that the standards say one thing while the expectations (feedback) say another. Aligning standards and expectations would fall under the manager's duties. Because, again, HR drones aren't going to be knowledgeable about the ins and outs of sales.

> it's clear that this is not the reason

In this case, it's not clear that this isn't the reason. That's something the laidoff employee calls out herself; the HR people aren't familiar with her KPIs or work. They don't have any expertise in her industry, and it's unreasonable to expect that.

Isn't severance basically said notice? If you still receive pay and benefits for a period of time, it's almost like you're still employed while the company minimizes potential damage from laid off employees. It's also considered rude for companies to not provide severance in these sorts of jobs.

I'm not sure about that last part. A meal that lasts an hour is on the long side while a concert is several hours long. In my area (San Francisco) and experience, it's like $20 for a dinner or $50 for a concert.

FWIW, I also operate on the experential-model, and I'm going to remember a concert far more than 3-4 random dinners.

> If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they cost, then open up a bakery.

What's the endgame to ever-increasing share value exactly? It's easy to say that a company should never stop growing, but there's no way that's a realistic ideal.

I find it interesting to consider other forms of entertainment that aren't commonly thought of as such. Case in point, food is a form of "entertainment"; you need the basic nutrients, but those can be supplied very cheaply. If people consciously thought about how much a dinner costs per hour, it might lead more people to change their dietary habits.

Another example would be makeup and fashion. It's a more subtle type of entertainment (more akin to "being on a cruise"), but the cost per hour is relatively low. That said, the benefit per hour is also low, and it's something missing from this sort of equalized comparison. One hour being at a theme park versus scrolling on Twitter versus watching a movie are very different values.