rndmwlk

>1) There are so much BS jobs in BS companies it's hard to understand if those are even companies doing real thing (cf. David Graeber)

This time last year I was searching for a new job, something I've done a few times at this point in my career, and this was such a pronounced thing that I had not experienced in any of my previous searches. It felt so strange, like walking through some funhouse where I had to be skeptical of every turn and decision lest I walk face first into a mirror.

I eventually found a great job with a great team at a smaller company that I had some initial reservations about and even held back on applying from at first. Maybe it's just an additional symptom of (4), but if this is the future of finding employment it is a bleak one.

>If Reddit could grow to the size it had with management that was harmless at best, what could it do if Steve came back?

Harmless at best wasn't enough, so let's bring in actively harmful!

I'm being hyperbolic but Reddit doesn't really seem to have grown in any meaningful way for a long time; frankly, it has regressed in many ways since Steve has regained the reins.

Steve is operating with more info than I am, so maybe all his decisions are sound from a business perspective, but as a user I've only seen Reddit become less useful, less novel, less active, and less enjoyable. As a result I use it less, and I know others use it less as well. There is no real moat to Reddit outside of it's user base, if they continue to push too hard I don't see how they survive.

It's only arbitrary if you make it arbitrary. A strict ban on "military and warfare," may prevent some relatively innocuous projects from reaching fruition, but I find that to be an insignificantly small & significantly worthwhile cost to pay considering the flip side.

>migrant children show up and work and just lie about their age or supply forged documentation, which is impossible to verify for the company or any US agency.

Except it is possible, obviously, as the Department of Labor ultimately discovered the child labor. Auditing isn't simply looking over some spreadsheets, I've had to audit inventory before back in the day and we had to go to the warehouse and verify actual inventory. These auditors aren't doing their due diligence because these auditors aren't hired to find any issues, they're hired to provide a passed audit. The solution is that these audits shouldn't be privatized, or significantly heftier fines need to be levied to align incentives.

It’s disingenuous to frame using data to train a model as a “view,” of that data. The simple cases are the easy ones, if ChatGPT completely rips a NYT article then that’s obviously infringement; however, there’s an argument to be made that every part of the LLM training dataset is, in part, used in every output of that LLM.

I don’t know the solution, but I don’t like the idea that anything I post online that is openly viewable is automatically opted into being part of ML/AI training data, and I imagine that opinion would be amplified if my writing was a product which was being directly threatened by the very same models.

I have a few friends in the trades, all part of a union, and none of them would echo this sentiment.

It's also funny because this is the exact same sentiment people complain about with the corporate world, where it's more about who you know than what you know.

I can only hope to one day build something as meaningful as "Fontly Color Fonts." Alas, there can only be so many geniuses capable of sculpting meaning out of the chaos that is the aether.

Then the author doesn't really understand what's happening or isn't making much sense.

There isn't anything, as far as I can tell, structure specific that caused this ousting. If it was a normal for-profit structure with a board of directors this same event could have played out.

What is surprising to Sam, and any casual observer, is this looks to be a massive overstepping of the board. By all accounts it looks like Sam was excelling in his role, and to fire him for seemingly no reason with no real transition plan is incompetence and should be unexpected from any serious company.

I think a more fitting analogy would be walking into a store to sit down and cool off with no intent of buying anything. You are "taking" passive resources (air conditioning, space, potentially employee attention). Would you consider that to be unethical?

Personally, I don't believe ad blocking is unethical because I don't believe the ways in which advertisers collect and sell their data is ethical.

I know you're getting a bunch of suggestions but I'm going to throw in my stupid simple approach that I've loved.

First, if you don't like the texture, as others have suggested, go with steel cut oats or whole oats (I always get Quaker whole oats, cheaper than a lot of the steel cut oat brands).

I like my oats savory. I pretty much eyeball everything but I do about a little more than half a cup, add water until I can barely feel it through the top of the oats, microwave for 2 minutes. Then add a little bit of butter and salt, mix it up, and you've got yourself a breakfast.

Whoops, I totally misinterpreted that! Apologies.

I couldn't disagree more. You can easily twist his letters to his son to create this narrative. If you read it as a whole his message isn't at all anti-marriage, he was a devout Christian who believed wholeheartedly in marriage. His message was that marriage takes sacrifice, faith, and a conscious effort (in his opinion specifically on the side of the man). It's a bit Kierkegaardian.

At my previous job, when they did their return to office rollout, I remember the head of our department waxing on about how much he missed being in the office with everyone. He missed it so much, he went on, that while he would previously have kept his office door closed so he could work in peace and quiet he actually kept it open (that day) so that he could hear all of the din of the office.

This brought me great comfort when I struggled to hear anything during any of my meetings (all of which were still remote in nature due to a diversely located team).

Also, social security contributes to taxable income.

>So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required.

I've found that's due to completely backwards incentives. Most people don't give a fuck because they aren't rewarded properly. If I do an excellent job and complete whatever task I'm given well ahead of schedule the only reward I get is more work. Even if I sandbag a bit and do an excellent job and complete on time, often the reward for being "better" is more responsibility or more difficult tasks (without compensation). Some folks want that, many do not. Dollars to doughnuts if your team members know that quality work on schedule will be actually rewarded then you'll find more of those members capable of producing that quality of work.

If all out war breaks out between two nuclear powers I don’t think 155mm production/stockpiles are going to be quite as impactful as these folks say.

A lot of these screeching hawks are the same who were warning about the capabilities of Russia. China is still well behind technologically, and is also highly dependent on key imports for a lot of military components.

We aren't even close to the beginnings of AGI. An LLM is no closer to AGI than a model T is to a space elevator.

>human life is human life regardless of origin

Not regardless of age though apparently?

To say competition on pricing and product are orthogonal is to treat this like some sort of study and completely ignore the real world conditions that these businesses live in.

The salient point the author is making is these predatory pricing strategies allow these VC backed firms to capture a market, then the VCs exit and everyone else is holding the bag. It doesn't matter how good your product is if it costs more to run than it brings in it will, eventually, no longer exist. Ultimately, these companies business models absolutely did not outcompete cabs on merits alone; they had a better product that relied on predatory pricing to attract customers.

Strange stuff, some old internet art.

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/

Ahh, I see what you're saying now.

First, there's a bit of an assumption of local lending opportunities drying up. This isn't necessarily going to happen, local banks don't have infinite capital, but lets assume that it does happen and consider the scenario you outlined.

I think you are right in that there will be a misalignment of incentives. From the standpoint of long term assets the bank will be holding it will likely be diversified away from exposure to the town. I imagine banks wouldn't be selling off their entire portfolios, and would still have a solid amount of local exposure - but maybe not.

Banking is definitely not risk free! It is multiplying your money supply but doing so through leverage. Back to our scenario to see this effect, what "big bank world" allows there is a step that you missed:

  * regional bank gets local depositors to get cash for lending
  * regional bank can originate loans that they sell off to larger bank
  * larger bank makes long term money off the intrinsics of the loan
  * regional bank made short term money on sale and now has to invest in other long term assets
  * regional bank can originate more loans with short term money on sale
  * regional bank loses all lending opportunities they have locally, so now survive only on long term assets and depositors

So, the tradeoff is really: The town is able to get more local loans, but the bank is able to commoditize away (some) of their risk associated with this town. Is it better for the town to have less capital and a more aligned town bank? It's hard to say.

>Do they work out long term?

Assuming we are talking about loans as a commodity, yes & no. They work out in the same manner as any other economic commodity which is some will outperform, some will perform, and others will under perform. Will gold work out long term, or TSLA? If I could definitively answer these questions I'd be very wealthy. The logic behind tranching makes sense and allows some shifting around of risk and some diversification.

>If you are able to take riskier loans and sell them off from an area, how long until you have nothing but high risk left that nobody will touch? And does that leave places depleted?

This scenario of "nothing but high risk left that nobody will touch," can happen both in a non-commoditized world and in a commoditized world. There will always be loans which are too risky for a bank to take. Commoditization has increased the risk ceiling so to speak. If commoditization wasn't happening wouldn't these places still be depleted, what is shifting is that ceiling of letting people in or not.

>A bank serving a single town goes down with the town

This isn't necessarily a bad thing from the perspective of the town.

Been awhile since I've worked in the industry, but the commoditization of loans has increased the risk threshold banks are willing to take on. Can tranche up loans to cater to specific buyers and decrease the overall risk in certain measures.

I'd wager smaller banks would, in general, be more conservative with their loans if not for commoditization.

Also ignores the entire defense and aerospace industry. It's laughably ignorant to just write off the STEM talent at places like Lockheed, Boeing, Honeywell, etc because FAANG is a popular destination for CS grads. Also, people here (and in SV in general) doubt the capabilities and talent in the public sector until suddenly a Stuxnet is brought to light.

>After all, someone’s usefulness is by definition how much others are willing to give for something they do, and for philosophers that quantity seems to be $0.

I can only repeat my point so many times, this is exactly the outlook on life I find to be sad and ignorant. Philosophy doesn't poof into non-existence when it isn't supported by taxes, it becomes a playground for the rich and the rich get to decide what schools of thought are worth pursuing.

>If you went to a school where STEM students were forced to take a humanities course but humanities students did not have to take a calculus sequence, then you experienced the thing I described.

I did not view it as forced to take humanities courses, but as an opportunity to take humanities courses. I will also say that, if my memory serves, those humanities students were forced to take certain math courses (Algebra & Statistics). I agree that those same students would benefit greatly from being "forced" to take calculus courses - there are number of interesting philosophical concepts covered in calculus.

We just fundamentally disagree about what is important in life. If education does not become a public funded "burden" then it becomes a luxury of the rich. And yes, education can *and should* be more than just preparation for your role as a cog in society. I cannot take courses in philosophy if there is no one to teach those courses.

I never experienced anything like what you're talking about. I was happy to have elective courses because that meant I was able to study things that interested me outside of my planned career path. It sounds like you view education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI, productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to my previous comment - that is sad to me.

I really dislike this take. It's an oversimplified view of the world and a sad evaluation of what is important in the world. I'd much rather my taxes go to funding someone learning & teaching philosophy than subsidizing Lockheeds latest and greatest kill-bot. And to preempt the inevitable assumption, no I'm not a philosophy grad I work in finance. I did, however, take philosophy courses when I was a student and I believe I benefited greatly from them.

Obviously they can do whatever they want, no one is saying they are doing something illegal, the pertinent question isn't can they be doing this but should they be doing this. I disagree that this is a sound business decision, and that is taking into account their goals of going public and becoming profitable. Internet popularity is fickle and that is the only moat they have.

An ironic sentiment considering Reddit is entirely reliant upon free labor of both moderators and users who upload content to provide any experience whatsoever.

Reddit is, at the moment, purposely expensive to run. They could have chosen to be a much smaller operation and act as stewards, but they want to turn a Craigslist into a Facebook.

OpenAI will get the data one way or another. Frankly they’ve probably got about as much data from Reddit as they need. The user base isn’t against Reddit moving to monetize and they aren’t sympathetic with OpenAI getting a free ride, these are weak strawmen. There were ways to accomplish both of these goals that wouldn’t involve this change, but their real goal here is to kill off 3PA and it’s very transparent.