goldinfra

I had a crippling fear of flying and I still have anxiety about it. One way I got over it was by learning a lot more about aviation. Now I'm really not afraid of anything happening on a plane short of a. catastrophic failure like a wing snapping off or b. uncontrolled fire in the cockpit. Most other things are recoverable, and those problems are very unlikely.

The flaw that caused the fatal 737 MAX crashes was something that that better trained pilots would have been able to overcome. And this would likely be the case for most problems. The recent door plug blowout did not cause a crash, for example.

So I would not be afraid to fly on a 737 MAX from a major US airline over US territory. It wouldn't be my preference but I wouldn't be afraid to.

How is it opposed to OpenAI's goals to have a friendly company selling them chips instead of NVIDIA, which is, at-best, a neutral company?

Software is always more important than hardware. All the big players have access to NVIDIA chips today and yet only OpenAI has ChatGPT, proving the point.

OpenAI probably wishes someone would create competition to NVIDIA and this is Sam Altman trying to make that happen himself, since no one else seems to have been able to pull it off so far.

A conflict of interest would be OpenAI buying Altman's chips at inflated prices or something like that.

But if he makes a bunch of money selling OpenAI chips and OpenAI gets better/cheaper chips, that seems like pure win-win and totally free of ethical conflict.

A leader can't do anything on their own, they need people to lead. And those people deserve recognition and rewards. But in most cases there's no one more important than the leader. And thus, no one that deserves more credit than the leader.

I'm absolutely not comparing Sam Altman to any of these leaders, but just to illustrate how much vision and leadership does matter. Consider how stupid these statements sound:

"Jesus didn't build any churches, those were all built by brick layers and carpenters!"

"Pharaohs didn't build a single pyramid, those were all built by artists and workers!"

"Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves, he didn't break the chains of a single slave, that was all done by blacksmiths!"

"Martin Luther King Jr. didn't radically improve civil rights, he never passed a single law, that was all done by lawmakers!"

"Sam Altman didn't build ChatGPT, he didn't create a single ML pipeline, it was all done by engineers!"

It's a hard fact of life that some specific individuals play more important roles in successful projects than others.

If you want to get really basic: there's no OpenAI at all without Sam Altman, which means there's no ChatGPT either.

There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.

And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.

The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders.

Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.

Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.

Wrapping every third-party library in defensive code doesn't make a lot of sense since this isn't the most dangerous kind of bug. To make a one example of a million: a third-party database library that corrupts your database is infinitely more dangerous and that there's no form of wrapping that will save you.

Bad code is bad code. Bugs are bugs. This issue is not a major source of problems in Go code.

Sounds like you may be confused thinking that a panic in Go is like throw in other languages? Third-party libraries should virtually never panic. Go has panic, and it's useful for a few things, but does not use them as exceptions are used in other languages.

This is a bit like worrying that your programming language won't prevent a third-party library from sending a SIGKILL to your program or that it doesn't prevent third-party libraries from delete your entire file system.

No general purpose language protects against malicious or stupid code.

My sense is that you probably could help them get their technical act together, if the team was otherwise in good shape, but that you're probably not the right person to provide the kind of comprehensive leadership they need.

What's required to fix this situation is for someone to manage up and down the hierarchy, and it doesn't seem like you're going to be able to pull that off in this organization. Maybe someone with more experience could make it happen but it's probably just a shitty company and it's not worth the effort.

The fact that the CTO and directors let this situation fester for years is a sign that they're clueless and/or disinterested.

Best alternative would probably to create a new team to replace the previous team's services one-by-one with well-operated versions. And then fire the previous team entirely. Probably not a very fun job.

If you have better options, take them. I would.

Thanks!

I wouldn't expect them to be lying but there to be some data hiding in the "average" part of the ARPU. We often want the median or some other percentile, not the mean.

"We define ARPU as our total revenue in a given geography during a given quarter, divided by the average of the number of MAUs in the geography at the beginning and end of the quarter."

So that is about what I expected. I'm not going to dig into this but it could be very meaningful or extremely misleading. Interesting though.

I've used Digital Ocean (and many other hosting providers) for as long as most of them have existed. Most of my servers have been running nearly uninterrupted for many years. Yes, there will be a reboot or move every so often but the uptime is incredibly high.

The idea that single server is capable beat the reliability of a massively distributed system is counter-intuitive and yet usually it's the case.

The average distributed system is a house of cards that can come tumbling down if any one of a number of pieces fails. The average static server is a rock of stability, with very few failure modes.

That seems plausible but can you cite where these figures are from? Is this just a rough estimate from total numbers for the entire company of $REVENUE / $MAUS?

Isn't this intentionally priced so that people won't pay for it? Does Facebook really make €12.99 per month per user?

It seems designed to be priced as high as possible, so that users don't choose it and they can claim no one wants it, and that they have consent.

If it was €2.99/mo, which seems much more reasonable, how many people would choose it?

Most customers care about having the best of the available options. Rarely would any company deliberately choose to be behind where their competitors can be.

1. The way to run into undiscovered issues is to choose a completely custom firmware/hardware/software stack that almost no one else in the world is running.

2. Not sure where you're getting this from. There is almost always a price:performance calculation that results in current generation smashing the previous generation with server and switch hardware. Often this means not buying the flagship chips but still the current generation.

And a major reason to get off old generations of hardware is that they become unavailable relatively quickly. It's always easier to buy current generation hardware than previous generation hardware, especially a couple years into the current generation. This has nothing to do with chasing the latest hardware.

If you're not rapidly scaling it probably doesn't matter. But if you're still buying (and maybe even using) Haswell CPUs in 2023, you may be missing out in a big way.

A moderately large Haswell cluster is equivalent in power to a moderately powerful modern server.