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?