There is an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.

Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/

I get that there are better choices now, but let’s not pretend like a straw you blow into is the technological stopping point for limb-free computer control (sorry if that’s not actually the best option, it’s just the one I’m familiar with). There are plenty of things to trash talk Neuralink about without pretending this technology (or it’s future form) is meritless.

That’s significantly worse privacy-wise, since Google gets a copy of everything.

A recovery email in this case was used to uncover the identity of the account-holder. Unless you’re using proton mail anonymously (if you’re replacing your personal gmail, then probably not) then you don’t need to consider the recover email as a weakness.

Yeah, I was complaining too. Or am I not understanding you?

Having express self-checkoit is great. The Kroger near me went full-self-checkout. They have large kiosks that mimmic the traditional checkout belt kiosks, except the customer scans at the head of the belt and the items move into the bagging area.

If you have a full cart, you scan all the items, checkout, walk to the end of the belt, and bag all of your items. Takes twice as long as bagging while a cashier scans (for solo shoppers), and because of the automatic belt the next customer cannot start scanning until you finish bagging, or their items will join the pile of your items.

It effectively destroys all parallelism is the process (bagging while scanning, customers pre-loading their items with a divider while the prior customer is still being serviced), and with zero human operated checkouts running you get no choice

Sorry for the long reply, I got carried away. See the section below for my good-faith reply, and the bottom section for “what are you implying by asking me this?” response.

From the case studies in my scientific ethics course, I think she probably would have lost her job regardless, or at least been “asked to resign”.

The fact it was in national news, and circulated for as long as it did, certainly had to do with her identity. I was visiting my family when the story was big, and the (old, conservative, racist) members of the family definitely formed the opinion that she was a ‘token hire’ and that her race helped her con her way to the top despite a lack of merit.

So there is definitely a race-related effect to the story (and probably some of the “anti- liberal university” mentality). I don’t know enough about how the decision was made to say whether she would have been fired those effects were not present.

Just some meta discussion: I’m 100% reading into your line of questioning, for better or worse. But it seems you have pinned me as the particular type of bigot that likes to deny systemic biases exist. I want to just head that off at the pass and say I didn’t mean to entirely deny your explanation as plausible, but that given a deeper view of the cultural ecosystem of OpenAI it ceases to be likely.

I don’t know your background on the topic, but I enjoy following voices critical of effective altruism, long-termism, and effective accelerationism. A good gateway into this circle of critics is the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us (the 23/11/23 episode actually discusses the OpenAI incident). Having that background, it is easy to paint some fairly convincing pictures for what went on at OpenAI, before Altman’s sexuality enters the equation.

Fair enough. I disagree, but we’re both in the dark here so not much to do about it until more comes to light.

I mean, their press release said “not consistently candid”, which is about as close to calling someone a liar as corporate speak will get. Altman ended up back in the captain’s chair, and we haven’t heard anything further.

If the original reason for firing made Altman look bad, we would expect this silence.

If the original reason was a homophobic response from the board, we might expect OpenAI to come out and spin a vague statement on how the former board had a personal gripe with Altman unrelated to his performance as CEO, and that after replacing the board everything is back to the business of delivering value etc. etc.

I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but given all we know, I don’t think the fact that Altman is gay (now a fairly general digestible fact for public figures) is the reason he was ousted. Especially if you follow journalism about TESCREAL/Silicon Valley philosophies it is clear to see: this was the board trying to preserve the original altruistic mission of OpenAI, and the commercial branch finally shedding the dead weight.

I seriously doubt it had anything to do with his wedding. I don’t think the sexuality of a CEO is that big an issue in this day (see: Tim Cook).

Especially considering how Atman’s has steered OpenAI vs. the boards’ stated mission, it seems much more likely that his temporary ousting had to do with company direction rather than his sexuality.

SBF’s peak was a few years ago. This year all he’s done is show during his trial how deluded these techbros/EAs can actually be. At least SBF had the common courtesy to remove himself from public life within 5 years. Style points for the life-in-prison ending, while simultaneously killing mainstream crypto.

We’re stuck with Altman for the foreseeable future, and now with a recently purged OpenAI board that will let him continue the industry-wide commercialization of copyright infringement (but only of the laypersons’ IP. Better not ask it to draw Mickey Mouse, though).

It’s also really unclear where OpenAI lies on the EA/Longtermist/E Acc pipeline. Altman is likely letting whackos have some pretty serious power.

I’ll just add that “designed to be burned up” is the correct approach to these types of satellite constellations. SpaceX has that aspect correct, at least.

Agree with everything else. Musk is a batshit egomaniac, and letting him dictate use of large infrastructure is careless. Government subsidies should entail a certain public influence over the operation of the system.

It bugs me how easily people (a) trust the accuracy of the output of ChatGPT, (b) feel like it’s somehow safe to use output in commercial applications or to place output under their own license, as if the open issues of copyright aren’t a ten-ton liability hanging over their head, and © feed sensitive data into ChatGPT, as if OpenAI isn’t going to log that interaction and train future models on it.

I have played around a bit, but I simply am not carefree/careless or am too uptight (pick your interpretation) to use it for anything serious.

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I’m glad to see for once the fines are proportional to revenue, and not a fixed amount. 6% hurts.

That is one theory, based on a conversation captured on another (not-directly-involved, but on-site) office’s bodycam footage. It isn’t really conclusive, it’s on-scene hearsay from what is likely the downstream end of a game of telephone.

The more productive avenue for discussions, in my opinion, is to consider whether firing pepper balls at non-violent individuals is perhaps negligent or reckless use of force, that escalates the situation without solving anything.

Isn’t the competitive price match policy a symptom of their monopolistic domination?

Amazon uses its vertically integrated distribution to provide faster shipping. But their marketplace has a higher cut (5% iirc Edit: 15% average). The price match prevents sellers from adjusting Amazon listings to compensate for those fees, forcing the decision to (a) sell at lower margin on Amazon, (b) don’t sell on Amazon, or ©, raise the price across all marketplaces to maintain margin.

Rather than holding Amazon prices down, it pulls prices on other marketplaces up. It’s an abuse of the inertia of a large customer base to prevent competition by other marketplaces on the basis of a different blend of cost and delivery service.

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Although this is likely from crawling, which would apply to any federated social media too once it becomes large enough to be on their radar.

There’s an explanation of the relationship floating somewhere online, but yeah. S76 works with Clevo to design their products, then does the software and firmware support in-house. Clevo will offer their own product reusing portions—i.e. the chassis—of the S76 model.

I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.