theoryofx

"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE]

This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.

"It's an industry standard because other compensation methods for salespeople that pay them like all the other non-salespeople don't work ..."

[citation needed]

I think it's more accurate to say that it's an industry standard because it works, not because nothing else can work. There's a lot of herd mentality and (much more reasonably) risk aversion when it comes to messing with revenue generation.

Sales people that don't sell just get fired, that's the thing about being such a quantifiable role. So in practice at a startup with a hot product you end up with a team of sales people receiving huge amounts of cash comp.

Everyone in in a well run startup org gets performance based compensation in the form of increases in salary, bonus, and equity.

There's no reason sales people couldn't be compensated in the same way. The reason they're not is just that it's considered an 'industry standard' to reward instantly with cash.

Sales people have themselves a sweet deal they're loath to give it up whether or not it's in the best long-term interests of the company or even themselves. It's not a terrible thing but it does seem an anachronism that will go away.

Yeah no doubt you have to have performance based compensation but that's exactly what equity and bonuses are for everyone else. Sales people are special in getting large amounts of cash comp in addition to equity.

"this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..."

For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.

The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event.

The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.

The lidars used on self-driving vehicles are far more capable and far more expensive.

"The updates often come from US based FTP servers."

Almost never FTP and it's not a significant difference if the Chinese company uploads it to S3 and the device downloads it from there.

One thing that I appreciate about dang, and PG before him, is their intellectual honesty and strong sense of ethics.

On the face of it, HN should be terrible. It's a forum owned an investment firm as promotion for their business.

But because HN was started by an individual with real values, and has been operated day-to-day by individuals that followed in his tradition, its been capable of unreasonable greatness and real authenticity.

At this point, HN is sort of the tail that wags the YC dog. There are a great many seed funds but only one HN.

It would be a good thing for the world if HN was spun out as a non-profit and maintained long-term. But in any case, we can all hope that it will at least continue to be stewarded by good people for a while longer.

Good luck and thanks!

The massive problem as I see is that Chinese intelligence has the incentive and capability to do this and yet no one seems to be doing anything about it.

"these exploits that need a human in the loop to deploy -- I'd be more worried about who you let near your electronics "

These devices are flashed in factories in China and receive firmware updates over the air from China. There's no human required.

"you need a human analyst to listen to the interception. Perhaps a second to translate it."

Have you missed out on this new "AI" thing everyone is talking about?

First implementation used an SQLite database (with WAL log) – only to find it corrupted after just couple of days of extensive power on/off cycles.

Did you try setting `PRAGMA synchronous=FULL` on your connection? This forces fsync() after writes.

That should be all that's required if you're using an NVMe SSD.

But I believe most microSD cards do not even respect fsync() calls properly and so there's technically no way to handle power offs safely, regardless of what software you use.

I use SanDisk High Endurance SD cards because I believe (but have not fully tested) that they handle fsync() properly. But I think you have to buy "industrial" SD cards to get real power fail protection.

He knew the system well and seemed to do enough local testing to avoid major breakage but still. Why have a bunch of rules and policies that you do not follow yourself?

Because these rules and policies are for people that are judged to need them by the person with the authority and responsibility for making the decision.

Policies like these always have a cost and (hopefully) a benefit. Presumably this lead dev judged that the cost vs benefit didn't make sense for themselves but did for others. It's entirely possible they were correct.

I do not have any affiliation with Elevenlabs or OpenAI except as a user of their APIs. I'd actually prefer it if OpenAI had a better realtime product than Elevenlabs because it'd be more convenient.

Still seems like Elevenlabs is crushing them on realtime audio, or does this change things?

Okay this looks pretty good.

Also just found https://github.com/amasad/jfk_files although it's only 1000 files or so.

Is this "conclusion" based a single social media post?

I'd expect that at the very least this release includes fewer redactions.

But I have yet to see anyone do the analysis.

I've tested Gemini 2.0 Flash on a bunch of the JFK Files PDFs and it's excellent.

Even with extremely blurry typewriter scans that are difficult for me to decipher.

It's incredible.

I'm sure there's cases where it will fail but just OCRing 90% of the files would be a big win.

Yeah, I expect it'd mostly be useful for OCR and search. These are hard to read PDF files and there's a lot of them.

I found a few projects related to using AI with The JFK Files but they all seem old or uninteresting. Which is why I'm asking here.

You've got to work on something where there's an immediate distribution channel and customers. Don't work on anything so speculative as this, where you're just hoping there will be someone who wants it.

You have to know how you're going to sell it before you build it. There are only a handful of things that work, which other people are using and you can copy.

Really is. Seems like they lost their nerve. Their credibility is in the toilet now. Clearly not good faith actors.

Which is a shame because seems like there's a real opportunity to really shake things up with an open voice model that's competitive with the proprietary ones.

Oh well. Someone else will do what they claimed to want to do.

This is the logical conclusion of companies with undifferentiated crapware products that compete using aggressive sales teams.

Sales driven companies are all corrupt and corrupting. This kind of espionage is common, as is outright bribery of buyers.

Yes, Caesar was an invader.

But it's important to understand that all of Gaul was tribal. The was no unified country. These tribes were invading each other's land constantly to loot, rape, kill, take hostages, enslave, and extract tribute.

Gallic tribes had famously sacked Rome, and if Rome hadn't become so powerful they would have happily done it again. German tribes had successfully invaded Roman territory as recently as around the time Caesar was born. They were a legitimate threat, especially to the Roman province, although it's also true Caesar's had other motivations.

Again, it's just much more complicated than when for example Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded the entirely peaceful country of Poland. Or when Putin invaded the entirely peaceful country of Ukraine.

He fought it against the wishes of the senate.

This is factually incorrect. He was a proconsul in command, fully authorized by the Senate.

You're probably referring to the fact that some of his political opponents in the Senate tried to score political points criticizing his war in Gaul. There was no real question of the legality then or now. False legal claims like this were standard practice and everyone took them for the partisan maneuvering they obviously were.

Sure. Notice the size of their armies in the link I provided vs. the count of dead people and enslaved people. These were civilians.

These claims are all incredibly speculative. We actually have no real idea how many people (civilians or otherwise) died in these wars. Caesar himself is the primary source and we know for a fact that he tended to wildly exaggerate his numbers.

Agreed. Both sides were terrible in that conflict. That doesn't make him a non-dictator because he won over another dictator wannabe.

The two facts I provided were: he was a dictator and he was violent. Those are indisputable objective historic facts.

Another indisputable fact: he wasn't violent as dictator.

Pointing out a legitimate double standard is not "whataboutism" in the least. Either you have principles that apply equally or you do not.

China sterilizing and and enslaving a million Uyghurs isn't bad enough to warrant your condemnation?

We have different values.

"About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree"

You might be very surprised at how differently ancient people viewed the world compared to yourself.

Sure, no one wants to be killed or enslaved but the societies of these very people behaved in precisely the same way as the Romans and most ancient societies did. These were not peace loving hippies being invaded by alien monsters.

Anyway, Caesar was not dictator when he fought in Gaul. He was a Roman proconsul/general fighting in his provinces the way all ancient Roman armies did, and was more inclined toward mercy than most, although he also fought a much bigger war than most.

In the civil war Caesar was fighting Pompey, the guy who used his military power to control the Roman government for the previous decade. And who would have continued controlling the government had he won. The narrative that Pompey was defending the republic against a tyrant is more ancient propaganda than reality.

A reasonable and accurate summary is that Julius Caesar led a violent army against violent enemies, fought a civil war with unprecedented clemency, and was a benevolent dictator until his assassination by the envious people he had granted clemency.

What bothers me about this is not injecting an opinion (it's TechCrunch) but the superficial and ignorant take.

Julius Caesar was not just some "violent dictator" like a Hitler, Stalin, or Putin. He wasn't sending people off to gas chambers, gulags, or out of windows. He was famous for his clemency toward his enemies in the civil war which made him dictator.

Even the title of "dictator" was a legal office in ancient Rome and meant something very different from the modern usage.

Zuck admiring Julius Caesar (which doesn't mean endorsing all his actions) puts him in the company of many of the most successful, ethical, and well informed people in history

Neither of these points contradict the fact that Americans very broadly support Israel and are opposed to Putin and Russia. Of course there are varying degrees of support on any specific issue.

Yes, the UN has attempted many more resolutions against Israel than against China for its treatment of millions of Uyghurs, North Korea for enslaving its entire population, Russia for murdering tens of thousands, Iran for its direct terrorism, and the list goes on. Which is not exactly the ethical high ground you seem to think it is.

Your statement doesn't make sense.

Most Americans do support Israel and are very opposed to Putin and Russia.

Check the polls.

Which is why it's suspicious that JD Vance and Trump seem so afraid to upset Putin.

The idea that Russsia could have compromising information on one or both of them is entirely plausible. It's a way politicians have been controlled for literally thousands of years. J. Edgar Hoover controlled every US president for fifty years with this one simple trick.

Many people have inherited great power and wealth and squandered it. That's the default case.

Philip inherited too. He built on his father's very considerable success, just like Alexander built on his father's.

Amyntas III -> Philip II -> Alexander III

They're a dynastic set. There's not a lot of sense in separating and comparing them.

But in terms of lasting impact, it's not even close. Philip II exerted control over Greece for a brief time but didn't change much. Alexander changed the entire world permanently.

1. He never lost a battle and conquered more territory than anyone in history, all while leading from the front. He's considered the greatest military leader in history by most every other great military leader in history (are you a better judge?)

2. Many of the Diadochi (his bros) went on to great success, and he picked all of them.

People love to be contrarian but it can get ridiculous. Claiming that Alexander the great wasn't actually so great is just boring.