It's also a head-ache for options traders because some options models (black scholes) have log-normal pricing baked in which don't actually allow for the underlying asset to go negative. So nevermind worrying about taking delivery, your HFT options desk just had their algo blow up.
I find the Libertarian obsession with Argentina quite curious. There seems to be this view that Argentina is massively over-regulated with massive government and that if you strip that all away Argentina will be a power house of productivity and wealth. The problem I have with that is... that's not libertarianism. Thinking that Argentina should be regulated and taxed a bit more in line with a modern liberal European democracy is not a demonstration of the successes of Libertarians. I would think that the libertarian would be far better pointing at a low regulation, low tax economy and demonstrating how reduced regulations would help there. Maybe for example, take the US banking regulations and strip them away - if the libertarians are right, we'll see a boom lifting all boats. If they're wrong we'll see a string of notorious and massive scams ripping of the average American. Unfortunately that'll never happen so I guess we'll never know.
I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.
Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
That's not really possible. If you're writing a dissertation and find that some of the important foundational work you're building upon is wrong you can't just ignore it. If it's wrong, you need to say it's wrong in order to justify why you've chosen not to consider it in your dissertation. If you can't claim it's wrong, then you have to use it in your dissertation otherwise you're going to leave yourself open to criticsm that your dissertation ignores important prior work in the field. So the only choice you have left is to write your dissertation built upon work that you know is trash, and then if you do later choose to publish criticism of that work you're essentially trashing your own dissertation. And of course, none of that matters, because you're still going to face professional consequences when you choose to write the separate paper disputing the famous paper.
Sorry but I don't think you understand the newspaper business. Bezos bought the entire Washington Post for $250m. Amazon has a market cap of $2T of which Bezos owns ~9%. The capitalist incentives are very clear, the market dictates that Bezos should do practically anything to WashPo to help Amazon. Let's say that WashPo drop to 0 value, that would be a real shame! And I'm sure Jeff would sigh really quite loudly while sailing his megayatch over to Blue Origin where they're working on that $3.4B contract for Nasa that Trump could cancel any minute. That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
I don't know what you think market forces are going to do here?
> That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.
Nice. I wonder... A Copilot prompt of "[...] Instead of using units of dollars, please use units of "Amazons", where 1 Amazon equals 2 Trillion dollars." gave a plausible result. And country populations in NYC's. The speed of sound is 19 Zebras (at max gallop). Great Oxygenation Event occurred at 8 gal and Cambrian Explosion at 18.5 gal (galactic year). Oscars viewing cost 100 lifetimes, superbowl 650. c is 1800 Gff (gigafurlongs per fortnight). Rewriting problems and text using alternate units. So... how to use this in education?
I have some sympathy for the view that we've just handed back some of the gains, but I don't understand the attitude about sanctions. Russia is a small economy. A small economy who primarily exports gas & oil to eastern europe. If there really is a peace deal and sanctions are lifted, I don't see how that positively impacts the US? It means cheaper oil for eastern europe (pricing out some of the US nat gas exports), almost certainly higher deficit defence spending across Europe (on local heroes, no one is trusting the US for security). Other than "good news markets go up" is the logic behind thinking a peace deal would drive US markets? A laughably theoretical deal for minerals?
I think it's actually valuable to hear from one of the former Tory ministers who was in favour of the bill says[1]. I don't necessarily agree with him, but it's interesting to hear he essentially argues that you don't have the security you think you do. If a bad actor wants to pwn you they'll do it on your device and you can't stop them. I think that's broadly true of some actors. If you personally are being targetted by a motivated opponent then yes, they will likely target your personal device first and then encrypted cloud is essentially moot. It's also an interesting idea to not say "We need this to tackle CSAM" but instead to say "We need this so that these companies can't enable CSAM whilst claiming to be unaware" - I think on a practical level that does hold more water.
At the end of the day though, he doesn't address the clearest problem with these backdoors which is that the payoff value of being able to blanket unencrypted cloud data is of such high value it's extremely likely to get exploited, and for the average person you're more worried about being exposed as part of a broad attack on infrastructure not a targeted attack on your individually.
It's also pretty difficult to give credence to the idea that they need this tool to tackle CSAM or organised crime. The reason you can't believe that is because they don't tackle CSAM or organised crime by and large. The UK government simply hasn't prioritized policing that, so we're not in a context of "we're doing all we can but we need more powers", we're in the context of "We can't be bothered, curtail people's rights so our job is easier". I'm sure Apple is not in favour of CSAM, but Apple isn't a member of the British police responsible for investigating and tackling CSAM, why are we trying to recruit them to be?
I don't think that's very persuasive. Targeted compromise of iPhones is incredibly expensive, and relatively hard for mere criminals to access. If that's the only way for a bad actor to access your data, you've instantly taken everyone but the most wildly sophisticated (and wealthy) criminals and state actors off the table.
Meanwhile iCloud backups are available not only to sophisticated folks who can compromise Apple's servers, but also to anyone who can social-engineer a password recovery flow or bribe an Apple customer service agent.
Second, re: CSAM, the iCloud ADP system is focused on backing up your personal devices. It is not designed to share data with other users. So a criminal can have CSAM on their phone and simply turn off iCloud Backup (and thus be "invisible") or they can use ADP. The two things are equivalent, and both assume a sophisticated user. I'm sure there's some bizarre and painful scheme where you could use ADP to distribute CSAM to other folks, but there are many easier ways to do that. Once you grant the CSAM point, you're just saying it's necessary for all personal device data to be constantly available for search by the government. (And while I disagree with that opinion, it is an opinion and should be fully fleshed out.)
> If a bad actor wants to pwn you they'll do it on your device and you can't stop them. I think that's broadly true of some actors.
I mean that is correct in the literal sense. Both Google and probably Samsung can hack my device remotely by remote code execution via targeted updates. So American and South Korean authorities.
But I don't think any "bad actor" could do it?
Like, the Foobarland police. Is that a reasonable take?
I wonder how much stock people put into people like Andrej's opinion on an Elon Musk project? I would imagine the overwhelming thing hanging over this is "If I say something that annoys that man, he is going to call me a pedophile, direct millions of anonymous people to attack me and more than likely will attempt to fuck with my job via my bosses".
Let's say the model is mediocre. Do you think Karpathy could come out on X and say "this model sucks"? Or do you think that even if it sucks people are going to come out and say positive things because they don't want the blow back?
Karpathy knows Musk better than the vast majority of people - he worked for him for an extended period of time when he was head of AI at Tesla. We're likely talking personal phone number and getting invited to dinner kind of "knows", it was early enough. He also spoke about Musk and his management style favorably in various public talks. But when it comes to feedback on the model - if you read Karpathy's post, it's not all positive. It is a strong model (eval scores attest to that), but it is still deficient in some niches, and he points that out.
Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same. It's endlessly curious how people who don't know him are confident they know better.
Yep. This came out in that recent issue with him hiring someone to play a game. As I recall, he got called out for it by some streamer, and Elon ended up blocking him.
Many people who work under him say he’s the worst kind of seagull boss imaginable: swoops in, understands nothing, fires people for funsies, gives unreasonable orders, and leaves. Don’t be around when Musk is at the office is a common refrain.
But yeah, I’m sure he presents himself well to his C-suite “peers.”
Who specifically? Could you name names? Or are you going to ask us to believe without evidence that the guy who got FIVE mega-Unicorns off the ground (3 of them "impossible") "understands nothing"?
That's actually pretty good evidence he understands nothing.
Either he's the faster learner in the history of mankind or he actually knows very little about his _10_ companies, 14 children, and countless other video game accounts.
He has a degree in Physics, that is like half of any engineering curriculum. Before funding SpaceX he hired several industry consultants to educate him, indicate aerospace engineering textbooks to study, etc. And then he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla. And somehow, after he and the SpaceX team achieved what dozens of other teams with more funding failed, he "understands nothing"? No need to be "the faster learner in the history of mankind".
Someone being capable in one field doesn't means he isn't a insufferable jerk or a moron in other fields. I don't understand this impulse to paint someone as completely black or completely white.
Consensus seems to be that he has some kind of a dual degree (obtained simultaneously) which includes B.S. in economics and a B.A.(!) in physics. That A would imply that he probably took the easier physics related classes (and probably not that many in total given the 2 degrees for 1 thing).
Regardless, a bachelor degree hardly means much anyway...
Is there any indication that he's a particularly (or at all) talented engineer (software or any other field)? I mean, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really matter or change much. Just like Jobs had better/more important things (not being sarcastic) to do than directly designing hardware or writing software himself.
I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
He also "held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games."[1] , has some software patents (software patents should be abolished) from his time at Zip2, and made and sold a simple game when he was twelve.
So he has a little experience working directly at the low level with his physics degree and coding knowledge, but of course it was not his talent in those that made him a billionaire, it might even have been the opposite. So there is indication for the "at all" but not on how talented. I guess one versed in BASIC can read the source of his game, but that was when he was twelve...
But yeah, nowadays he has thousands of engineers working under him, of course he is going to delegate. The the important thing is the system engineering, making sure the efforts are going in the right direction and well coordinated. He seems knowledgeable and talented enough at that. Evidence for SpaceX: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
> I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
Is there any conclusive evidence either way? IIRC he allegedly got into graduate program 2 years before getting his 2 B.S. / B.A.?
Don't let the facts get in the way of the "Musk is a midwit who just stumbles into founding trillion dollar companies" story. ;) It's an article of faith for these people.
I'm not sure how Musk not being anywhere close to being a talented engineer or scientist somehow diminishes his extreme success in other fields? That seems mostly orthogonal.
Having a PhD. or any field is relatively ordinary and not that impressive on the grand scale of thing. Founding several extremely successful tech/etc. companies is on a whole other level. Being a horrible software engineer (as his public action/communication on the topic would imply) seems entirely insignificant and hardly relevant when he has much more important things to do.
Of course other with comparable achievements (e.g. like Jobs who I don't think ever claimed that he was a talented engineer) weren't even as remotely insecure or narcissistic as him.
You are making a big logical jump here. I only gave one company as example because that is enough to disprove your previous post.
Also, before you thought he knew very little about his many companies, implying no distinction, but now you adjusted up his knowledge about two companies, but inexplicably down for the others.
You also imply he should give equal attention to all of them, ignoring some of them are bigger, more important, or simply more interesting to him. Is equal attention the optimal strategy here, or you would be getting an F grade if you suggested that?
He didn't need to invest a lot of time to make a good investment in DeepMind, that was then bought by Google, for example. Investing in what you know and understand is a good investment advice, but so is to diversify your portfolio and to not spend too much time optimizing your investments in lieu of everything else.
Some of his "investments" are more like spending on a hobby (as destructive as it can be, in the case of twitter for example... or constructive like SpaceX), so not even bound by those rules...
Can confirm via anecdata: some people have always seen him as the narcissist child he is, and have proactively avoided reporting to him in any capacity. A few years ago I found this perplexing and hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong.
You can list lots of people who haven't suffered his wrath. But that's not evidence, that's lack of evidence. I can provide you with someone who does have his phone number and does know him and says something quite different[1]. There's a litany of examples of Musk deliberately endangering people he's decided to go to war with - whether that's spurious accusations of pedophilia or forcing a former employee to go into hiding.
Yeah but those people don't have anything to lose by saying that. They're either nobodies or politicians/celebrities that are well known for being liberal.
Just because they won't face consequences, doesn't mean Karpathy won't.
I like Karpathy, but I find it odd how he always backs up his former boss’s technological assertions, even the more controversial ones. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him openly disagree with Musk.
Yeah, how can you honestly review something associated with the world’s most powerful person? Who’s also shown they’re willing to swing their weight against any normies that annoy them?
And one of the strongest militaries in Eastern Europe with a whopping 4.7% of GDP providing an independent bulwark against Russian aggression - fulfilling the exact role that Trump claims to want in Nato.
