hinterlands

It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience.

I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.

Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that there are people who feel rudderless because there is no roadmap or a thing carved out for them to own. Similarly, the flip side of "strong bias to action" and "changes direction on a dime" is that everything is chaotic and there's no consistent vision from the executives.

This cracked me up a bit, though: "As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!

My local Cinemark has tickets for $5.50, $8.50... you're probably in a premium market.

> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.

Yes. Look, I'm not arguing this is bad, I'm just trying to respond to the original question and capture the essence of the debate.

There are three pertinent points: (1) it's EDTA; (2) it's not that EDTA is safe or not safe, it's that no one applied to have it approved as an OTC medication; (3) you can still (probably) sell EDTA as a supplement in the US, but the FDA grumbled about it, which angered various chelation cranks.

Probably, but the process doesn't work that way. The default is that you can't sell medication to people, period. Some pharmaceutical company applied to have a specific form of EDTA approved as a prescription drug, and that was that.

Separately from this, substances that meet the criteria of being "natural" can be sold as supplements as long as you don't claim they cure anything. EDTA is naturally-occurring and you can buy it as a supplement in the US, although the FDA has some beef with this, which I think is what the original remark might be alluding to.

EDTA is also a common food additive and a laboratory reagent, so people who want to use it can buy it easily, which makes the whole debate basically performance art.

It's about EDTA. It can be legitimately used to treat heavy metal poisoning, plus some other things. Some people (who are probably misguided) want to self-medicate. The FDA won't let you. Hence, drama.

Because what's the headline you're going to get out of it?

If the headline is "Mark Zuckerberg is amassing your data and you know it's for evil", it's an easy sell. If it's "there's an ecosystem of little-known companies that sell transaction, location and lifestyle data to marketers, journalists, PIs, and police departments alike", it's not exactly the kind of a message that spurs people to action. And yeah, the newspaper that would be breaking the news is a customer too.

I think it's fairly common for technologies to get really good just as they're becoming obsolete. Vacuum tubes, CRTs, optical disks, photographic film... in fact, they're often in some respects better than the early generations of the technology that replaces them.

But OLEDs just have too many advantages where it actually matters. Much lower power consumption, physically more compact (no need for backlight layers), etc.

That slo-mo video is somewhat misleading, though. The phosphor glows for a good while, so there is a reasonable chunk of the image that's visible at any given time.

The problem in that video is that the exact location the beam is hitting is momentarily very bright, so they calibrated the exposure to that and everything else looks really dark.

The Chinese medicinal herb you're thinking about is sweet wormwood, from which we isolated artemisinin. Artemisinin isn't a suppressed secret. It's one of the major treatments for malaria and it netted its discoverer a Nobel prize.

The drug the article is talking about contains artemisinin in combination with another substance.

We know how to deal with malaria, so this isn't some story of Big Pharma hiding the truth. The disease used to be endemic in the US and in Europe. Better treatments save lives, but eradication hinges on economic and political factors... which are in turn not helped by malaria.

> Also, LLMs can generate prompt files too.

Sure, but the utility of that for PCB design wasn't demonstrated in the article. This is an expert going out of his way to give the LLM a task it can't fumble (and still does, a bit).

Similarly to how most web dev isn't exactly on the frontiers of computer science, a lot of day-to-day PCB design isn't about cutting-edge analog or radio stuff. It's just putting the same MCU or SoC on differently-shaped boards over and over again.

If you can reliably automate that, it's still a pretty big deal.

While I think that AI tools can be quite useful for coding, PCB design, and other tasks like that, the setup of this experiment makes it really hard for the LLM to fail.

The author's prompt is basically already a meticulous specification of the PCB, even proactively telling the LLM to avoid certain pitfalls ("GPIO19 and GPIO20 on the ESP32-S3 module are USB D- and D+ respectively. Make sure these nets are labeled correctly so that differential routing works"). If you had no prior experience building that exact thing, writing that spec would be 95% of the work.

Anyway, I don't think the experiment is wrong, but it's also not exactly vibe-PCBing!

I do think it's an SFBA / generational bubble. We have plenty of boring, expensive software projects that someone will always bring up in a HN thread. For example, every time there's a thread on PCB design, you have some folks talking about Cadence. What's there to say about Cadence? Well, first and foremost, it costs a lot. Otherwise, it lets you design PCBs. But there are people here who pay for it, use it, and want to talk about it.