Yeah the pooling funds part confuses me. What is the damn issue?

Well, they also just straight up laid off 9,000 people this week so they are clearly in a mood to get rid of people. And I suppose they don’t mind firing people for small infractions because it accomplishes two things for them:

1. no severance required
2. sets an example and scares people into obedience

Free food is after all a perk that most people don’t get at work. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of perks that Meta employees get. I know for a fact that executives get sick and tired of employees being spoiled by all this and they probably took personal enjoyment in these terminations.

The author of this article personally breathed out 800 pounds of CO2 last year. Less than a horse but more than a badger and roughly on par with a kangaroo.

It’s hardly like getting fired is a ticket to a 6 month vacation. Misuse of funds like this is tantamount to theft and probably grounds to disqualify you from unemployment benefits. And anyway for these highly paid workers, unemployment is a tiny fraction of what they are accustomed to making. It’s a tough job market out there and Meta laid off another 9,000 this week so it’s a smart move to start job hunting the second you’re unemployed. I know people who have not found work after 1 year. A vacation? Shyeah no.

I’m just trying to understand how UberEats is a good way to feed an office. Are we talking about 3 people in a WeWork space somewhere? I can’t imagine 250 UberEats orders all arriving somewhere at once and getting to the right people. Or even 25.

Of course. He’s a jerk and we hate him now therefore everything he does must be utter bullshit.

It is hugely overvalued. We should scoff at their crazy highs instead of penalizing them for being below them. You can’t necessarily be blamed because at certain points investors wildly overvalued you. A lot of times the stock market punishes success. My employer for example doubled its business during COVID and when that spike eventually cooled off we were still on a good growth trajectory but a couple of quarters came in at negative YoY revenue and of course everyone lost their minds. This is why I always look at the zoomed out graph. It’s so easy to miss the real story looking at any one slice of it.

There are some interesting efforts in this direction. Not “without” propellants but with much less. There’s Spinlaunch, the company developing a kind of catapult that gets small rockets high into the atmosphere. And there are efforts to launch smaller rockets from the wings of high altitude planes.

We should not be “happy” with the current state of things. Anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program knows what a lousy deal it is launching chemical rockets off the ground. A tiny bit more payload and you need more fuel, more fuel adds more weight and you need more more fuel…

Rocketry is currently a tiny proportion of emissions so I’m not worried about it. But neither am I complacent about current technology.

Here’s their all time stock price graph. Not exactly a death spiral, though that 3y performance number makes it sound so. The 1, 2, and 5 year numbers don’t tell the same story. You might even say it was a bit of a cherry pick.

Disclaimer: I own no TSLA shares. I just know how to manipulate stats for effect, so I know when it’s being done to me :)

There’s little doubt that he squeezes high productivity out of people. He just does so in a combative and oppressive way that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near.

I also believe that he pushes his engineering teams through problem solving challenges (which does not make him an engineer) by ruthlessly interrogating everything. That’s not salesmanship…. But I’m not sure what you’d call it. Product, maybe?

There are probably more things you can only find off Amazon but they’re distributed all over the place so this is harder to see.

I feel like they should pay me for watching The Rings of Power. But I’ll always be grateful to them for picking up The Expanse and finishing the show.

Irrelevant. You don’t get to grammar like Shakespeare did.

Yes the circle jerk on this has gone way too far.

What’s laughable are the “terminator” scenarios where it suddenly comes to life in an instant and in that moment already has the power to wipe us out, and then does so.

A more likely scenario is that we come to rely heavily on AI more and more as time goes by, until it truly does have a grip on resource supply chains, manufacturing facilities, energy plants, etc. And I don’t just mean that machine learning gets used in all of those contexts because we are already there. I’m talking about custodial authority. We’ve ceded those duties to it in large part - can’t do those jobs without AI.

Then a malicious AI could put a real squeeze on humanity. It wouldn’t need to be a global war. Just enough disruption that we starve and begin to war among ourselves. Has anyone ever noticed how many of us there are now? Our population would absolutely fall apart without our massive industrial and agricultural complexes running full time.

It’s incredible what we’ve been able to do for energy efficiency when the driving force was making phone batteries last longer. Imagine if we cared enough about having a planet to make phone calls on.

This guy… he’s untouchably wealthy and people bow to him like a god everywhere he goes now. I think this really twists a person’s brain - at the very least it puts him out of touch. He probably has almost no idea what he’s talking about anymore.

So the model has to meet a new decency standard that’s higher than they demand of streamers who show their real bodies?

Sorry I’m just confused if they are saying the digital model needs to cover the caster’s real hips, or if the digital model needs to be wearing clothes.

As you can tell I’m pretty far from this universe :)

It would be an epic double-down if he spent his entire personal fortune to acquire Intel, taking on a large amount of stock ownership in the combined company. As if he had so much confidence in the future that he was willing to bet everything on “we’re just getting started here.”

Yeah I only mean to point out that we don’t really need to scratch our head and wonder what it must be like for him. He might never have thought about it. Maybe he has and feels bad. Maybe he has and thinks he deserves every penny. I don’t know.

I do a fair amount of charitable giving myself, and I have one rule: if you’re not giving until it hurts a little bit, you’re not giving enough. I personally don’t think the world is fair and I have obvious advantages and good luck so while I don’t agonize over every paycheck I do feel some responsibility to help others. I hope Huang does the same. If anyone has info on his charitable works or lack thereof, I’d love to hear more.

It’s a little more than a slightly better UX. Dismissing the entire concept of the instance removes a fair amount of complexity and fragmentation from the equation. There are so many cheerful guides out there about how to select an instance and every single one of them loses 95% of normal people in the first paragraph.

Having a signup model that people understand helps. Concentrating everything in one schema creates a noticeable increase in density of relevant content. Having corporate money for real hosting and security counts. When you fediverse instance goes down to DDOS or implements crippling safeguards because they can’t keep up with the spam, you really feel how the whole thing is run on a shoestring.