thraway3837

Thank you for saying this. Business strategy will always ruthlessly optimize for efficiency. And this means doing more (or same) with less humans. Anyone not seeing this happening already isn't seeing the news.

60k fired from Microsoft

Today Cisco announcing 1 engineer using AI to try to replace/improve 98% of Cisco's code

Goog just lost $475B in value

These are not random disparate events. This is the industry changing to business as usual with less humans.

Note that people laid off are not able to find jobs for more than 9 months. This is a very serious situation.

lol really? Downvoted for stating facts? I guess should not be surprised

For those saying dissolve the HOA or don't buy in an HOA. FTA: The developer, who owns the majority of the houses controls the HOA.

It is not easy to buy a house in the US that is not controlled by an HOA. A lot of houses are in an HOA and you really have to go out of your way to avoid it. If you're looking in a suburb, exurb, it's 100% going to be an HOA. It's by design:

HOAs are tightly connected to racial segregation, racially restrictive housing, and redlining. Read up on those and it will make you sick to your stomach.

Controlling what homeowners can do to the exterior of their houses has been the main theme of many HOAs. Combined with this, racist policies and architectural uniformity were historically intertwined. They were both done for the same reason: protecting property values.

Are you angry yet?

Some HOAs do OK and are kind of like a collective: They form their own street cleaning, street light installation and electricity bills, snow plow, garbage pickup, lawn mowing all for a deeply discounted monthly fee of sometimes just a few $10s a month.

Perhaps really unpopular and a hot take. So what?

It's a book. It's meant for the masses to consume and read. And so a computer read it and add it to it's intelligence that everyone else can access. What's the big deal?

I don't think there is such a thing as copyright, patent or intellectual property rights in the AI world. What is the point of one human making another human pay to access the works of another human? There is no point but just accumulating wealth and superiority. Are we really going to sit here and ignore that maybe the professors had privileged lives and their parents or their ancestors enriched themselves on the backs of poor people.

Either way, whatever the arguments, democratize this knowledge. It sure as hell beats paying $300 for a textbook and requiring that for 1500 students every year. Give it all to the people. All of it. Let the people train open weight and smaller models that even more people can access. I'm all for this.

These are people's livelihoods and affects their ability to live decently. So before we get into a discussion of it, we must at least accept that as the common ground.

The issue with most enterprise size workplaces is that the core teams that are actually working on revenue producing stuff is very small. The rest are support staff. I worked for a large bank and we had over 100 mobile software developers. Think about that for a second. A mobile application with over 100 people. That does not even include other teams that these 100 people depend on.

But you have to truly ask the difficult question: are all 100 people actually working on revenue producing work? The answer is that easily 60-80% are not. In fact, we had teams in the east coast that was the bulk of the 100 folks who did nothing but write documentation, guard their networking and data frameworks vehemently, and the rest of the time was spent fighting mundane software tasks.

That team could have been effective with at most 5 folks. In the world of AI coding, 5 folks would be an absolute force.

A lot of large workplaces are seeing these changes, because they simply got fat. Even Apple, which historically has been praised for weathering the layoffs has recently laid off many middle managers and employees working on useless things. It's part of Ternus' shake up. And it's not because of some evil corporate strategy to treat people like crap, it's really not. Strategically you have to ask yourself if you are truly being productive and truly a core member of a core team. If you are not, and simply wrangling JIRA and stuck in back to back meetings all day thinking you're a decision maker. Sorry but you're on the layoff list.

The bank wasn't the only example, I've worked in mid-large workplaces and with just a bit of introspection you knew immediately if you were a core member on a core team. And if you weren't, it was always in your best interest to constantly keep yourself ready for the next thing.

It's amazing to me that 1 person with a $20 subscription can crack what a $4 trillion company with entire security departments can accomplish. This person is incredibly talented.

But, hey, when we interview them for a job lets be sure to spend 2 weeks sending them take home projects, reverse a string on the white board, reject them and talk about how they can't code, right? /rant

And the worst part is that once you take the plea deal, you are guilty. Both in perception and by record. So once it comes out that you plead, your employers will fire you. Makes it impossibly hard to find another job as your name comes up as a criminal. What I'm really confused about: Can't they have just checked the victim's bank records? The money would be taken out of the the Cash app and back into their own account. Or, if used for other service, there would be records of where it was spent and you could see the geographic activity.

On an entirely different note. Just wow. I know a lot of people who don't "do online" finance anything. And this kind of stuff is terrifying, because they would not even know that someone else had setup an account using their PII.

Jury duty is the single dumbest thing I have ever done in my adult life. Nobody wants to be there, and half the jurors were falling asleep. When we got to the deliberation room, everyone wanted to GTFO as quickly as possible and we just went by our feels. In the end, everyone loses. Millions of dollars wasted... on perception of justice. What a freaking joke.

"However, the level of social media amplification around this incident has brought scrutiny that is out of proportion to OTP's place in our business"

This is 100% accurate. State run media would have squashed this article if it was not for an international incident response. They have federal laws that prevent such disclosures because it affects the national image and could cause social unrest.

They got their image hurt, and pulling the culturally appropriate response here which is to never apologize and to never accept fault. Instead quit/resign and say that other stuff is just fine. It's really not fine, and you can bet that the same corporate philosophy that made the CA error will have serious security errors in their other products.

I keep yelling that we should not be trusting China with this any more than you would trust Zuckerbgerg with you personal info. And yet, somehow, the propaganda programming from China is so thick that any commentary about their models is met with name calling.

We had a discussion yesterday, and I will repeat it again today. There is no profit for Chinese billionaires to be making these models. So then what is their purpose?

I'm still not understanding why one hobby projecing being open source means others should also be open source. So you're saying that PRC is making a bet against US companies and the US markets to crash them in order to stifle the US economy? That is an interesting take, I would think the US market is far more resilient than just the tech stocks. Speaking with my communist friends though, it does seem like this is the ultimate goal: Topple the US hegemony and US foreign control by crashing it's economy while China makes a bet on free/cheaper AI models, with the ultimate goal of agitating the people enough to cause a revolution to turn the US into a communist state (really delulu stuff if you ask me)

Seems kind of pointless? Wouldn't anyone in the US/western world simply use the chinese models in their own inference? That would not strengthen the Chinese position because the models got downloaded for free off HuggingFace, and then cloud inference bills would just put money into US companies.

Has anyone figured out why Chinese billionaires are releasing these models? Do they hold short positions on US markets? Why would Xiaomi, et al. release these models in the first place? What is the strategic purpose here? I cannot believe for a second that they are doing it for human good.

I don't understand why this is such a shocker to some of you. China is not and has never been a good guy. Neither is the US. It is the US best interest to hold certain strategic technology as secret and prevent any other nation from having access to it. Whether this is by banning export of EUV machines or by restricting access to Chinese AI, both are normal political moves.

The issue with dealing with a country whose culture is more transparent (US) than closed doors hush secrecy (China) is that stuff like this comes out and people have opinions about it. China on the other hand keeps quiet about this stuff and instead spreads propaganda about how great their country is.