Eric Schmidt killed what Google could become by making it the monster it is today.
Essentially, he made it into Microsoft when it was on a trajectory to become a glorious Sun.
For decades, SUN Microsystems was a great place to work.
From SUN came some amazing technology that still lives on(ZFS anyone?).
I prefer organisations like that over organisations that’s only purpose seems to be to extract wealth from the economy, to line the pockets of the few well connected.
This is more common than reported.
I’ve lost a semi expensive present, and have heard anecdotal stories of people losing handbags, jewelry, higher end clothing/shoes.
It seems to be more prevalent in the US/TSA than other first world countries.
This story from SFO where the luggage handlers stole a gun from a retired police officer is pretty funny, though the article leaves out the part where there were numerous earlier complaints that were ignored:
United Airline luggage handlers at SFO decided to steal and resell weed from smugglers, then got robbed on camera at the airport while moving trashbags of it to their car. They got caught because they decided to report the robbery to the police!
Most other countries don’t have such powerful agency behind airport security. I don’t see a politician who would dare to limit TSA powers or even put some pressure. BTW I myself had ~$50 item in luggage missing (and TSA card left) but was busy at the time and haven’t reported (also I had no hope to have the item recovered).
It seems pretty straightforward. The TSA doesn't focus on competence when hiring, resulting in a less competent workforce. They have an entire department dedicated to prioritizing characteristics unrelated to competence, such as skin color, sex, etc.: https://www.tsa.gov/civil-rights-diversity-and-inclusion.
This is not the case of most countries and in fact, it's illegal in many places to do so.
It does to me. The goal of achieving a workforce that is phenotypically representative of larger society (a goal of that department) is incompatible with the one of achieving a competent workforce. If the goals were compatible, there would be no need for such a department as it would just occur naturally through hiring the most competent workforce. The department exists because hiring the most competent workforce does not result in a workforce that is phenotypically representative of larger society.
The devil is in the details. Training large LLMs requires a lot of custom infra (handling GPUs going down, efficiently pushing data to keep the accelators busy, deciding on which mechanism of parallelizing model training is better - data vs model parallelism or both, tuning hyperparams of optimizers which can be different for larger batch sizes, etc)
Mosaic is one of the better providers for this. AWS is nowhere near ready at this current point in time, it is pretty much a "dumb" infra provider in large LLM training at this point. (Of course they won't be standing still and will prob acquire that capability one way or another)
