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If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.

Its less funneled although most straight lines will approach the southern tip of India. Singapore is one of 2 possible ways through Indonesia and its the shorter one.

Look at the map, all ocean travel between East Asia and India/Europe basically has to go past Singapore. They've been a trade and financial center with a substantial chinese population for a long time.

Both the Soviet and Chinese first few five year plans accomplished the following:

1. Mass starvation at a few points due to central planning errors

2. Horrifying purges and paranoia that cannot be excused as "errors"

3. Achieving mass literacy and a partially industrial economy in a single generation, from a medeival starting point.

Most good Americans who paid attention in civics class learned 1 and 2 very well without truly appreciating 3.

You have to understand that they were coming from a peasant economy where nobody could even read. It's an accomplishment despite Mao's shortcomings and awful deeds. And look at the scoreboard today. Highest GDP by purchasing power parity in the world. Xiaomi cars are nicer than Teslas, only non-American tech industry, high speed rail, etc etc.

Agree wholeheartedly with the exception that Bush 1 alone out of all of them may have actually been a successful shadowy lever-pulling elite. Spends his early life running a tiny front company for the CIA then all of a sudden he's the director, and then a top member of the Republican party. All while maintaining this "aw shucks", dorky persona.

xAI joins SpaceX 6 months ago

I looked, and you outlined a solution that would be hard to achieve in a vacuum chamber on earth. Now we're going to launch it into orbit and it will work great?

Building data centers in Antarctica with nuclear power would be easier. And still way harder than necessary.

xAI joins SpaceX 6 months ago

Seasons mess that up unless you're burning fuel to make minor plane changes every day. Otherwise you have an equinox where your plane faces the sun (equivalent to an equatorial orbit) and a solstice where your plane is parallel to the sun (the ideal case).

xAI joins SpaceX 6 months ago

Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.

xAI joins SpaceX 6 months ago

I think he's genuinely changed for the worse, quite a lot, in the last 10 years. Staring down failure seemed to keep the worst tendencies in check, being untouchable amplified them.

Nitpick, blacksmiths typically did forging, which is hammering heated metal into shape with benefits for the strength of the hammered material. CNC is machining, cutting things into the shape you want at room temperature.

Forging is machine assisted now with tons of tools but its still somewhat of a craft, you can't just send a CAD file to a machine.

I think we're still figuring out where on that spectrum LLM coding will settle.

I think you're being a little unfair to the civil servant who has to follow the law regarding procurement.

I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".

Amazon in particular has a highly formalized ritual for reporting up and down that consumes managers entirely. If you don't play, youll be humiliated and fired. The engineers self-organize while the managers are working in their own, different universe.

There's 2 orthogonal lanes:

1) A philosophical debate along the lines you've indicated here, how much is it worth to control the algorithm, and how much does that equate to controlling speech.

2) The allegation that current buyers bought it specifically to bring their ideology to the algorithm, however effective or valid you think that is (I think it just hastens TikTok becoming something for "old people").

OP said "buying TikTok was about hiding information from people", and the people who bought TikTok are trying to suppress certain information on TikTok.

Whether you or I think that's effective or not is up for debate, I also avoid social media, but OP made a statement about intentions.

(And, aside, the current intentions appear far more pointed and ideological than when it was owned by ByteDance as a lottery winner with a surprise overseas success, optimizing for youth engagement.)

And it got a Streisand Effect from the attempted scuttling. That doesn't change what they were trying to do, it just means they're not always executing perfectly.

In the long run, they bought out some dying legacy media in CBS and social media has a short half-life. Nobody's saying they're geniuses but it's clear what they're trying to do.

It's not about legality, its about scrolling and recommendations. Young people see stuff by other young people by default.

Its been a conservative/zionist talking point for years now that "the youth are getting brainwashed by tiktok", and Ellison in particular seems to be in the "I've gone hard right due to the latest Israel conflict" camp. So of course they're not being subtle about it.

Also, they typically started with much more of a high quality culture when they were small and people's contributions were legible.

Once it turns into a giant bureaucracy with people you've never met judging a promo packet by rubrics, while they're unfamiliar with your whole org.. the incentives get diffierent.