sadface

This is absolutely mindblowing. I understand that these LLMs are essentially "really smart autocomplete", but it's crazy to me how could Bing/Sydney could actually go this far to seemingly express emotions and desires. It's like they gave the AI a personality (that, yes, can go unhinged, although that's almost misses the point).

It really feels like he's interacting with a person here. How can they do this??

The way this is phrased makes it seem like this "treadmill" is a bad thing. I acknowledge that this is bad for an individual, but I actually think this is overall good for humanity and is a major reason why we've developed so much so quickly.

We know plenty of animal species are really smart, but they've never figured out how to build skyscrapers or generate electricity. We chalk this up to the fact that "humans are just smarter", but even in humans brains alone don't bring accomplishments. There has to be associated action, and people need motivation to actually take that action.

Our ancestors didn't say "well I've figured out how to grow some wheat and live in a straw hut, so I'm good now". Sure, they probably did for a while, but soon they started looking for easier ways to grind their flour and tastier ways to cook it because they stopped being satisfied with the status quo. Extend this for ten millenia and now we have billions of people connected to a global network from devices in their pocket.

If humans were always perfectly happy all the time, I don't think we'd have come as far as we have. The "return to dissatisfied normalcy" that comes over time is part of our nature and it may be one of the most important parts for explaining why we got here.

Despite the name, it's probably less about mirroring college applications and more about competing for top undergrad/grad students who would otherwise be recruiting for companies like FB, Google, Bain, etc. When I was in grad school, the top tier firms started recruiting in the fall and their incoming graduates had all accepted their full-time offers before winter break. I believe this is the same for undergrad.

In a lot of ways, you could think about this as giving students more optionality as they will have the opportunity to consider YC alongside other extremely compelling opportunities. It's smart for YC to try and get in front of students when they're in a better mindset to evaluate that tradeoff.

I'm sure there are a lot of students who would have be great YC candidates but end up signing a Google offer in the fall and just stay there for years because the pay is so good it doesn't make sense to leave...

A startup/lifestyle company I used to work for several years ago aggregates the GIS data of these superfund sites (and other environmental points of interest) and makes it available at [1].

The site is pretty old and some of the links need updating, but they still link to the monitoring profiles of these sites. For example, here[2] is the CA Water Board page for the Page Mill HP site.

[1]https://whatsdown.terradex.com/ [2]http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/profile_report.asp?glob...

Thanks for linking this. I had a pretty tough time getting quotes on a custom PCB a few months ago. If I'd had this article ahead of time, everything would have made quite a bit more sense!

I appreciate the pun. ;-)

Anyway, I think self censorship is an expected behavior in a peaceful society. For example: you don't bring up recently deceased significant others, comment on awkward physical characteristics of strangers, or mock the suffering of others, without expecting repercussions. People learn at a very young age that certain topics should be avoided for the sake of "keeping the peace".

50 years ago you could use the n-word in business meetings. Now, not so much, but for a long time many people were "self-censoring" themselves to keep the peace in their workplaces. Some still are, but I imagine that most people these days are happy to be in a workplace where n-words are not tolerated. Not just for their own "sensibilities", but also the knowledge that their black coworkers/friends can be in an environment that is actively less hostile.

What we're seeing is the continuing shift in standards for peaceful society. So far I think the track record on these shifts is pretty good, so I'm inclined to let this ride for a while, even if some people have to keep "self-censoring" some of the time.

Good. People should be thinking twice.

Freedom of Speech is not the same thing as Freedom from Consequences. Unless we decide that being "aggressively antisocial" should be a protected class, private companies should have every right to fire employees who they deem toxic for their culture.

Great information here. This is well understood on my end. I just wanted to make a quick point because the topic was on food consumption and I don't think many people ever truly connect the dots between carbon atoms in the atmosphere -> carbon atoms in their salad -> carbon atoms in their breath (atmosphere).

Yes, but surface-level biology is pretty much carbon neutral. All of the carbon you exhale to the atmosphere comes from the food you eat, which gets its carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.

Obviously there are edge cases, but by and large Global Warming is happening because we're pulling carbon out of the ground and putting it in the sky.

Interesting information! I really like the analysis of video content, particularly the "founder presence" info. However, I think that the headline results that isolate video cost when looking at raise results is a bit of an odd way to do this analysis because it leaves out the rest of the marketing mix. I'm actually preparing a crowdfunding campaign myself (first time), and I'd think that the main levers for success would be, in no order of importance:

A: Pre-campaign support (solid email list, social media presence, etc), B: Video Quality, C: Rest of Page quality (ie: copy, visuals, etc), D: Paid advertising, E: Media Coverage, F: (Most important) Compelling product & pricepoint

Money Raised should be a function of a-f (and several other factors I'm sure I'm missing) so isolating any one of those variables on its own is not that useful. Presumably a campaign with a $100k budget for its video has also made significant investments elsewhere.

Something I'm still trying to figure out: assuming there is a limited budget, would one rather spend 20k on a video or 5k on the video + 15k more on Facebook ads? My thinking is that the 3M extra views (assuming $5 cpm) would be worth more than the marginal increase in video quality from $5k-$20k.

Granted, if there's a good ROI on online ads, the budget there should theoretically be "unlimited", but that's not always the case. Curious about other peoples thoughts here.

Maybe 30% of graduates of top 30 universities. There are lots of CS grads from lower ranked schools that are definitely not getting fought over by the likes of Google/FB/Amazon...

I'd be interested in seeing how a "single payer" approach to college financing would work.

High level - The government pours many billions of dollars into colleges and universities every year, but because the money is disseminated via millions of individual loans to individual students, any buying power (and downward pressure on prices) that the government could provide is effectively eliminated. For a university this is a best case scenario: sell a "necessary" product to millions of individual customers with infinite money.

If instead, the universities could only "sell" to the government, the government would be able to actually demand meaningful concessions in price.

I'm thinking something like:

1. Students -$-> Gov't -$-> Universities (many more sellers than buyers)

Instead of:

2. Gov't -$-> Students -$-> Universities (many more buyers than sellers)

Easy to see how case 1 would keep prices lower in an ideal world...

Totally agree in principle, but it does seem like just "getting into" the food delivery business is a humorously quick way to get a $X00M valuation in the private markets.

The trouble is you can't really traverse the waterline because there are lots of cliffs on either side of the beach - hence the importance of this access road.

You're right, but it would still be better to realize a small loss early in the crash and and buy back in at the bottom than just ride the whole thing out. Of course, that kind of timing is pretty much impossible so everyone suggests you don't do it.

Yes, in some parts of NYC (Manhattan, cool parts of Brooklyn) prices are indeed very high, but there are plenty of parts of NYC where you can find fairly affordable housing while still being in public transit range of the things that make NYC a major "World City". My friend is paying <1500/mo for a 1 bedroom in a good part of Astoria that's about 35 mins by foot + subway from times square. He only moved there a few years ago so it's not like he's taking advantage of some crazy rent control either.

You'd never find something equivalent in the bay area, so overall I think the "density argument" has some validity. Even more so if there would be willingness to expand the public transit infrastructure.

You're not wrong re: best experience, but your $1000 of GPU + $500 screen puts you in like the top 1% of gamers. Most ppl are gaming on cheap rigs, laptops, etc. It's possible that FB/Oculus are trying to make something that will only appeal to the big spending "prestige-rig" gamer set, but I'd think that they would be trying to make a product that will be compelling to a bigger audience.

Doing stuff like this helps Google perpetuate their reputation as a company that's doing "cool things that matter" despite the fact that, financially, they're just a big internet ads company. By doing these types of things Google has developed has such a good employment brand that they can get as many CMU CS Masters and Harvard MBAs as they want. They don't need 53,000 of the best and brightest people on earth working on AdWords, so letting some of these people loose on other markets kinda makes sense. Better to let them do it under google's umbrella than someone else's. And besides, they might actually succeed!

If the founders goals are to achieve a satisfying outcome ("financial security"), they would have to achieve a 2.5x bigger exit under scenario 2 than scenario 1. Andrew's new system retains scenario 1's "ease" of achieving a satisfying outcome for the founders while allowing the other employees to reap more of the benefits if the company grows further.

It's a structure supporting the idea that the first $X million are pretty important for the founders (or anyone, really) but the next $XXXm aren't as big of a deal and can be spread around somewhat, hopefully increasing the total number of people who hit $Xm within the company if it becomes huge.

I like the idea.

Sure, it's not impossible or nobody would be doing it, but it's still more expensive (a high deductible is still a "cost") and comes with a lower chance of success. Obviously that's going to shift trends in a more conservative direction.

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses.

The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable private insurance for them and their family, and sleep moderately well knowing that even if their new venture fails their children will at least be able make it through a state school working part time. Now, they'll have to pay through the nose for healthcare and we all know how much schools cost these days.

Given the increased failure rates of new ventures these days it's not so hard to see why more mid-career individuals are remaining in corporate jobs instead of venturing out on their own: it's getting too expensive to roll those dice.

A quick gander at his Linkedin shows about 2 decades of management experience. Either way, CEO's don't usually voluntarily step down at all unless they're retiring, so of course a statement like this would be unusual. He's making a wise move to get out in front of potential scandal rumors by making a post that essentially says that he wants to spend more time with his family. A perfectly understandable move, even for a career manager.

Slightly unrelated, but at least in the US "Organic" does in fact have a specific meaning with real standards that require USDA certification before a product can claim the term [1]. You may be thinking about "All Natural", which is effectively meaningless [2].

1. http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/NOPOrganicStandards

2. http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Markets/Natural-The-most-me...

I have a feeling that your sensitivity for "pretty intelligent" might tuned a bit tight. Sure there are a few "massive donation" students but otherwise HSW students in particular are pretty much exclusively 99th percentile types, both "objectively" (GMAT/GRE, Undergrad Institution + GPA) and from career progression standpoints. It's surprising that you would find so many of them to be merely OK or worse, so I'm kind of curious what you're looking for when you judge people's intelligence, if you wouldn't mind sharing.

Satya Nadella comes to mind. He got an EMBA from Chicago Booth, class of 1997.

You're not crazy, lots of people agree with you. Just please don't be like so many SF residents and complain that all the people "who made SF what it is" are being replaced by tech hipsters making 6 figs, while simultaneously complaining about any new construction in their neighborhoods. It's a hypocritical position. There either needs to be more tall buildings or people with sub 90'th percentile incomes are going to have to GTFO from SF until Silicon Valley collapses.

On the bright side, this is great for Oakland.

The problem is that there's always "something" more that could be done to prevent these types of incidents, but eventually the costs of additional preventative measures will outweigh the reduction in risk they provide, if they haven't already.

One of the projects Terradex, my company, works on is the collection and mapping of various sources of publicly available environmental data. We're based in Palo Alto and actually spent a decent amount of time getting information on various groundwater plumes in Santa Clara County.

We paid extra close attention to this HP plume and a few others like the MEW plume around the Google campus, drawing them in manually from documents, but the vast majority are created based on convex hull calculations from the well information available on geotracker [1]. They are not perfectly accurate but provide a reasonable approximation of plume locations.

We pulled this data together last year during the summer and haven't done much with it since, but if anyone wants to click around and have a look here's a link that will bypass the login requirement: http://cleanupdeck.terradex.com/target/map_icplume/16/37.424.... You just need to click on the "groundwater plumes" layer on the left, and when you click on a blue plume it will bring up an info panel, most of which will have a link to the geotracker page which collates most of the useful information about the plume.

[1]http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/data_download_by_county...

SRS is more of a parody of reddit itself, turned on its head to the point where it's the white men who get ridiculed and shouted down instead of the women/minorities like elsewhere on reddit. Unsurprisingly, many redditors, instead of just "taking a joke", like they would have women do with misogynistic humor, get extremely upset at the thought of a relatively small and powerless group of people mocking them.

The irony is thick and delicious.

Sure, you're not helping anyone by pretending to have a disability, but you're a grown adult, not an impressionable child. Assuming these kids really did learn something from this exercise it will help them be more tolerant and empathetic in the future, which isn't just good for the kids but it's good for everyone they will interact with for the rest of their lives.