I feel like in the parent comment coup is sort of shorthand for the painful but necessary work of building consensus that it is time for new leadership. Necessary is in the eye of the beholder. These certainly can be petty when they are bald-faced power grabs, but they equally can be noble if the leader is a despot or a criminal. I would also not call Sam Altman's ouster a coup even if the board were manipulated into ousting him, he was removed by exactly the people who are allowed to remove him. Coups are necessarily extrajudicial.
It also looks like Sam Altman was busy creating another AI company, along his creepy WorldCoin venture, wasteful crypto/bitcoin support and no less creepy stories of abuse coming from his younger sister.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
No. The sunk cost fallacy involves sticking with something you know is the worse option (sticking with that option is the worse option) by appealing to the investment already made in that option as a justification. It does not mean that all appeals to investment are fallacious. If I invested 5 years in graduate school, and I'm a few months away from receiving my doctorate, it would not be categorically fallacious to argue that since I've already invested this much time, I should stick it out even if I'm thinking of pivoting. You would be losing a degree for what could be a vanishingly small benefit of leaving.
In line with that, the comment above is asking for some reason that could explain why someone who has invested so much time in something would leave so abruptly. A person who has worked on a project for so long derives (and provides) many benefits for having been involved for so long, and even when people change course, they don't typically do so this abruptly without a proportional reason. Hence, the mystery.
I have a lot of Blackberry nostalgia; I was 23 in NYC, 2007ish, and my work-issued BB Curve (later a Bold) plus my personal original iPhone were a combination that I was so happy with. The Blackberry could tether to my early MacBook pro in the remotest of locations, and I could easily SSH into the (real) servers I ran. Never used BBM but played Bricks for hours and hours. I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with an iPhone-only solution until 2017 or so.
I want to endorse the process and maybe not worry so much about the result. I started on a similar journey in the pandemic of making pizza for my wife and kids every Friday night. They all receive their own (small) personal pizzas, which I knead, roll, and transfer from a pizza peel to a pizza stone. Starting from a NYTimes recipe for Roberta's pizza dough — a pre-children favorite of ours — and iterating from there, I became confident over dozens of repetitions. My pizzas now are very crisp on the bottom without being burned on top, and I can "sense" when the pizza is done, no timers needed. I can feel when the dough is hydrated, I can see when it's rolled flat.
All this isn't about knowledge that can be imparted in a book; it's frankly about kaizen. The art of doing it a little better this time than you did it before. If you do it 2% better each time, after ~35 times, you're twice as good. Don't get me wrong, I love (love!) the open knowledge here. But OP cannot put in the reps for you. Only you can put in the reps.
I love this. Also, in my experience doing the same thing with recipes from pancakes to roast chicken, I think it’s not just about kaizen—it’s also about the “tacit knowledge” that can’t necessarily be communicated through words.
I definitely wasn’t doing it 2% better each time — I was experimenting, trying out new things, seeing how they changed the outcomes, and building an intuition for how stiff the pancake batter was, what color it was, how much the chicken skin glistens, etc. When I tried something new, sometimes it was 2% better, but more often it was 25% better or 40% worse. Either way a success, because I learned what kinds of things were likely to work and what weren’t.
The “reps” help you not just get better, but (as you describe!) they build your mental connections between what you see, smell, and feel, and results. You start to recognize when things look or feel a little different, and adapt.
Honestly it’s a lot like developing expertise in programming!
This is where an experienced cook in the kitchen with you now and then can be so helpful. A book might give some pointers, but they can say "this happened because of that".
If you don't have that, try to not vary more than one thing at a time.
The problem with cooking books is that they represent the author's experience, local products and equipment. Different flours and yeast behave differently and ovens are not the same making a recipe just a starting point.
Lots of the comments here get at the reason, which is import taxes, but there's confusion about the impact of it on the high-end camera market. Most professional setups that use "still" cameras are running them into a video mixer (like Blackmagic ATEM) which connects to a computer. You can record directly onto disk and stream live at the same time using free software like OBS. The camera just sits with its shutter open but doesn't record anything, thus there's no time limit. The Sony A7 series is quite popular for this application. What I'm describing is kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of video capture complexity.
Off-label uses that appear to actually be effective include altitude sickness and prevention of SIPE (Swimming Induced Pulmonary Edema). I take it for the latter, and it's remarkable. No Sildenafil = I cough up blood after just a few minutes swimming in cold water (as in a triathlon). Sildeanfil = no ill effects whatsoever. I'm unclear how a vasodilator would impact a neurological disease.
Asking because I am genuinely curious, if you are willing to share: What mindset do you have where you keep doing an activity that normally results in you coughing up blood? I know that sounds like a super disrespectful question, it's just the sort of thing I think about a lot due to having some health related activity restrictions that I've had to negotiate with myself. Always interested in what other people's journeys are in this space.
Ha, fair. I love open water swimming and triathlon, and I can do it in not-cold water or a pool indefinitely, plus the Sildenafil entirely prevents it in cold water. Even without Sildenafil all I have to do is stop swimming and I'm fully better after an hour or so.
Yes. The first time it happened was in the Hudson River in the NYC triathlon. I thought for sure that I'd just ingested some sludge, and I went on to complete the race, after which I was sent to the hospital (I walked). My pulse ox was 86. Most triathlon deaths occur during the swim portion of the race and are attributed to cardiac events, often SCD, but pulmonary edema may actually be the primary cause. A teeny bit of education (chest congestion? get out of the damn water!) could save lives, but nobody in the business of triathlon wants to scare off new participants, since the amateur fee-paying end of the sport is really the whole game.
This off-label use of sildenafil for SIPE was part of a bigger scandal in the US Navy SEALs. Specifically, during the selection course for the SEALs, so many recruits suffered from SIPE it was common for many of them to surreptitiously take Viagra and keep training.
One soldier drowned as a result and another collapsed on land after a punishing swim and died.
I participated in the clinical trial at Duke that's linked to from that story, which honestly was a blast. That the medics let this guy keep training is astonishing to me. If they measured his pulse ox and sent him back in anyways, that's criminal. Also, as I understand it, Sildenafil during dives is a bad idea (something about seizures) which might be why it's "banned" in SEAL training.
But who funded the Duke study that surfaced Sildenafil as a candidate drug? The Navy SEALs, of course.
The boundary between useful advertising and word of mouth is exceedingly thin and contextual. When Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth, had it already won? Clearly not then and not now; it's barely posted an operating profit and it still a couple billion away from positive net income. Rather, it's in a duopoly in the US and an oligopoly in some other markets and facing a pretty gnarly advertise (defect) or not (cooperate) prisoner's dilemma. Word-of-mouth can be a form of promotion. Most products have obvious entry pathways which smart and experienced marketers will readily identify; few of these are display ads, fewer still are billboards.
The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.
>Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth
This is misleading. Ad networks were defrauding Uber by generating fake clicks so such that organic installs of Uber would be attributed to these ad networks despite the install not being from an ad.
The problem was the ad networks and not advertising itself.
This works well for me, too. My wife is a teacher. I appreciate her schedule and her outside perspective on my chunk of the tech industry, and the diversity of our perspectives makes us a better parenting team. I also appreciate the income diversification; I know lots of couples who have highly correlated salaries. Not a reason to choose a partner but something to try and de-risk if you’re in that position. Lastly, it’s nice to bounce product ideas off someone who is unimpressed by flashy features.
This isn’t to say that I think developers dating developers is a bad idea, choosing a partner is the most personal possible choice and I’m glad to see an interesting new angle on it.
As far as I know, CPA in most states requires 150 hours of college credit, of which many must be in accounting. My CPA friends largely joined the big four firm on the strength of their CPA, spent a little time in audit, then promptly switched to consulting. What you get from that certification is the ability to sign corporate audits, own an accounting firm, and the right to prepare and defend tax returns. Unless you are preparing for a second career in accounting, CPA seems like a lot to bite off, but good on you! I don’t envy you all the cost accounting headaches and audit rules.
CFA requires that you have work experience making investment decisions and can get references to that effect, but in all it would be easier than CPA.
Can confirm, plus there’s a 1 year requirement to work in the industry to get the certification after passing the test, and a continuing education requirement to maintain it. I studied accounting and passed the test, but immediately started working in tech so technically I’m not certified. The test was a beast and took about a year and a half to pass all 4 parts, and if you don’t pass all 4 within a window of time the old ones expire.
I'm restarting my own math education from the point of Calculus 1 so I can learn more about AI/ML, and want the college credits so that if I decide to do more graduate school, I will have solid prerequisites. I searched pretty exhaustively and settled on NetMath (https://netmath.illinois.edu/) which is a UIUC program. Most classes are self-paced and use Mathematica extensively, but you can go amazingly far in the program. I hope to get through their Calculus-based probability by about a year from now.
