dkokelley

You CAN turn off watch history in Youtube (not sure about Spotify). However, for better or worse revealed preferences seem to show that people prefer automatic content recommendations over doing the search & bookmark work themselves.

Not sure what the next best option here is. There was a thought experiment once where it would require the president to kill the key holder in order to launch a nuclear attack (the launch codes would be embedded in the designated key holder's heart). In theory this would make sure the president knew the seriousness of his or her actions, but it was never seriously considered as a protocol.

Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs.

Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!

There could be a common cause (all 3 cables terminate in the same city, could follow a similar path where a single event/failure occurred, etc.).

Another possibility is that these cables provided an ideal training environment to test the capabilities of an adversary to cut off a region from the rest of the world. I'd think an adversary in wartime would cut all 5 cables. Vietnam could be the victim of an aggressor who just wants to practice/prove capabilities without much fear of repercussions.

I don't know who would benefit from crippling Vietnam's internet infrastructure today, but it could still benefit another nation to see/prove that it could.

I've only been in low stakes sales roles (outside of personal projects) so this comes from someone with very little "professional" sales experience:

The good: setting a target comp that is realistic and explained (e.g. "I expect you to hit $200K 4/5 times with this plan.")

The bad: plans with complicated rules (x% up to $Y in sales with a kicker + incentives for certain deal structures) can be demotivating and incentivize the wrong sales behaviors

The ugly: some high-intensity salespeople might thrive on the chaotic and unpredictable nature of comp structures. I don't love the idea of hijacking the "gambling/variable reward" centers of the brain to get what you want out of your people. Be fair and simple.

Important distinction that a tax preparer != a CPA.

Honest question: Why don't more people (especially high earners) go with a CPA firm to take care of their taxes? With the amount of money involved, and the potential legal trouble for getting it wrong, the cost/benefit calculation seems to strongly favor hiring a professional to guide you.

Satellites provide humanity a ton of good. Would you say the bad outweighs the good overall? What would you propose we do instead?

A bit late, but I built a BattleBot back during the original show days. Never finished/competed though - I was in high school and couldn't make anything competitive with my birthday money. Learned a lot about radio controllers and aluminum angle bars! Taught my younger brother and we battled in the driveway.

Honest question, should services that host user generated content be obligated to provide that content "for free" through APIs or scrapers? On one hand, users created the content "for free" for the platform to use and monetize. On the other hand, providing the content through an API without any ad/monetization potential doesn't make good business sense.

Is there an acceptable threshold of free viewing before it becomes abusive? (Think, getting a single free See's candy from the store vs. employing an army of people to source thousands of pounds of chocolate treats.)

With the Reddit API issue I'm honestly unsure where I stand. I love(d) Apollo and want it to succeed, but Reddit is doing the work and not getting the rewards. Where do you draw the line at "fair"?

Is there something that the bused in/out employees could do to make a difference?

I'm pretty worried about this. The fallout/plume won't just be isolated to a region we can avoid or mitigate. It's in our waterways and in our air. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now we can detect it all around the world. We might not know the full extent of the disaster for many years.

Thanks for the clarification! It sounds like chatbots aren’t ready for adversarial conversations yet.

Ahh that makes sense. It wasn’t clear to me which parts were generated by the AI, AI instructions, or the human. I guess I got fooled by prompt injection too!

I don’t fully understand the prompt injection issue. In the bank example, the AI was previously told that a $1m credit was appropriate. There’s no context for whether the issue was or wasn’t the bank’s fault, so I assume the AI was given the answer that it WAS the bank’s fault, and then it responded appropriately.

Is the issue that the customer convinced the AI that the bank was at fault through prompt injection?

The airline lost the bag. The customers entrusted it to them, and it's pretty clear the fault lies somewhere on the airline's side.

Devil's advocate: The airline doesn't have access to the tracking data that the customer did. It's one of hundreds of bags they can't find owners for. Donating them doesn't seem like too bad of an option, provided they still make the customer whole.

#3 can be abused, but a 1 on 1 isn't meant to solve a bad culture.

Think of it more like "oh yeah my kid just started soccer at school", "we found this neat new restaurant", etc. It's relationship building. Work is more fun when you like the people you work with!

1. Here's what I'm working on. (Is this a good use of my time?)

2. Here are my blockers. (Can you help clear the way so I can do my work?)

3. Here's what's going on in my life (relationship building, context for manager to understand your work and capacity)

I guess eventually the earth will be swallowed up by the sun, but for practical purposes economic growth happens when we rearrange the atoms and bits at our disposal into things that people consider more useful. All of the materials to create a car existed here thousands of years ago, but we didn't value it as much until somebody figured out how to assemble it into a useful form.

What's more, an old junk car might be valued at $3,000, but we can take most of the same materials and transform it into a new car with $15K (or other goods we consider worth more than the $3K car). The same finite resources + energy & labor (when used productively) = economic growth!

This is an inane hypothetical.

I’m sorry. You’re right. I did not mean to insinuate that Sam was embezzling from Twitter.

If I remember, a set of emails went out to everyone at Twitter. You either got the “we’re sorry” email or the “you weren’t laid off” email, along with instructions if you were a part of the laid off group.

https://twitter.com/MiikeCuevas/status/1588347810872557569

According to https://twitter.com/magey/status/1610856428646064129 the 60 day notice ends tomorrow, so it’s possible the payments are being sent at the last possible day.

Why couldn’t 1 person be terminated for cause, even in the midst of a layoff?

Imagine a company going through layoffs when it discovers an employee had been embezzling funds. Does that employee have to be treated the same as the ones who are simply being laid off? What if that employee WAS going to be laid off, but then the embezzlement was discovered? I guess that’s what the lawyers help to decide…

Was Sam laid off or terminated for cause (and was the cause justified)? Not a lawyer, but other than lying or an administrative screw up it seems like a for-cause termination might explain the situation.

It's a nice data point, but it's not necessary to me. Do you have the source code to your mail service provider or your online banking software? [1]

Having the source code available says a few nice things:

1. This company is confident enough to show their work

2. This company is "good" at software engineering (or it could reveal the opposite)

[1] I know some people can and do run their own mail servers. I can respect that, but I trust the Google devs and organization to be properly competent and incentivized to do a good job keeping my email account safe.

I don't buy the "if it's open source we can see/audit/trust the service" argument.

1. Bugs get missed all of the time in OSS. There is no guarantee that the more eyes the better, and in fact there may be a negative correlation due to the bystander effect [citation needed].

2. A software service is a complex interaction between many pieces of software. Two perfectly secure, audited pieces of software could interact in an exploitable way.

3. Just because the service provider tells you "this is the code, this is how we keep you secure, etc." doesn't mean it's true in practice. A bad actor could modify the code in production before the next version of "audited, trusted, OSS" is vetted.

4. Security practices outside of the code also matter (arguably more so), and even an organization with good policies can fail to follow them at times.

Ultimately, we're trusting the people behind the services we use to be honest and do their best. It seems that LastPass has demonstrated they aren't as deserving of that trust lately, but THE SAME THING COULD HAPPEN AT ANY ORGANIZATION.

Footnote: LP/1P could push an update that grabs everything necessary to decrypt your password vault the next time you log in.

Agreed to a point. Smaller companies can more easily get enough manufacturing capacity elsewhere, but larger companies are trapped by finding that capacity, technical ability, and hitting the price points they need at scale.

At the risk of being an Apple apologist, their manufacturing is effectively held hostage by China. Yes Apple is taking the "make more profit" choice, but the alternative is pretty devastating to the company. Long term, Apple needs to diversify their manufacturing footprint.

(Note that I still think Apple would adhere to the CCP's requests/laws just to be able to sell in China. China would ban Apple products if they believed Apple was not cooperative.)

The power dynamic between China and Apple doesn't get enough attention. Apple needs China, but China doesn't need Apple.

There are few if any places capable of manufacturing the amount of products China does for Apple, especially at the price. China is also an enormous market to Apple.

I don't agree with the treatment of protestors or the use of technology to surveil its citizens, but the bottom line is that in China, China calls the shots. Apple can either get in line or manufacture its phones elsewhere.

Agreed that squeezing too hard will probably backfire. I don’t agree that encouraging or facilitating the crossing is a win-win.

It’s likely that the landowners bought the plots strategically to get de facto “ownership” of the public land. Why buy all of the land when you can buy the moat around it?