> She's described as an executive and as a director in articles.
I once met with a person who used to be a vice president in a major US bank. I was impressed, until much later when I discovered that there were three thousand “vice presidents” in that bank.
VP is a low rank at a bank but a high rank at Meta. I would be very surprised if anyone at Meta with VP in their title made less than $1M total compensation. "Director" at Meta is also a high rank.
> it's not the millionaires who pull the levers. It's the rank and file.
“People can vote whichever side they prefer, as long as their opinions are based on fake news.” It's difficult to talk about rank and file pulling the levers, when millionaires manufacture the news.
You say that because you know that the news is fake, and you know that because it's not really that difficult to figure out at least an approximation of the truth. You know who are the abject liars (because they routinely tell outright falsehoods), and you know who at least tries to get it right even if they sometimes fail at it.
It's not that hard. People seek out the fake news; the millionaires and billionaires are just providing slightly better versions of it. They could be doing really sophisticated propaganda but they just don't have to. People are pleased to believe the most outlandish lies if it affirms their egos.
It's not that hard when you have proper education, scientific practice, understanding that you don't have to succumb to the fear pumped by those in power, and surplus time and energy to put everything in perspective in a constantly changing world. Otherwise, I'm afraid it's difficult to break out of one's echo chamber.
Or, the answer is simply “they didn't survive”, which is the case for countless babies who died because an activity as simple as hand-washing wasn't known to be a matter of life and death.
> He was someone who played games and manipulated his way through his career. He could say the right things and navigate his way through office politics unscathed while causing damage to everything he touched.
Not the one you're replying to, but is the above quote not enough to explain why they were a mis-hire?
I think there's nuance missing from his take that people gloss over.
To me it's more like "don't over-invest on the early thing you're going to throw away". That implies that:
- You're making a thing, and making it quickly - optimizing for rapid market/customer feedback
- You're making it in such a way that you can replace it
- You have real plans and a sincere intention to actually replace it if you start to scale
I have no problem with those, but what I see at a bunch of startups is:
- Make a thing, don't worry about paining yourself into a corner because "we're moving fast"
- The thing hobbles along, the product gets some interest
- It's incredibly hard to maintain, replace or otherwise improve
- Original authors leave to other pastures because this isn't fun any more
- Other folks come along and have to work miracles to try to undo the gordian knots that were made
In other words: I like the idea of moving fast early on. Duct tape programming, love it. We also have to pay attention to the long term impacts of the decisions we're making. Some things are easy to fix/replace/undo, others are brutally hard.
Say you write a prototype in {Ruby/Python/Perl/??}, now you have mass adoption and you rewrite a slow part of it in {sexy_modern_language}. That's great.
Say instead that you decided to store all of your data in some bizarre format, hosted on IPFS, accessed via bittorrent, through an onion network, via ZModem, with CORBA - and you bake this in to such a degree that it's intermingled everywhere. Now you have a dilema:
- you have a business, making money
- you have increasing interest
- you have a system that's effectively impossible to change or reason about
- you can't really improve things to match the customer interest
- you're wedded to the design because things are so interwoven
- your only option is essentially a ground-up redesign and rewrite
Now - if the product is simple enough, rewrite away! (think early Twitter), but if it's not? Good luck to you.
I've seen this pattern more times than I haven't, and I think it deserves more nuanced thought and care when it comes to the economics at play.
Please show me one doctor who recommended taking a rock each day. LLMs have a different failure mode than professionals. People are aware that doctors or therapists may err, but I've already seen countless instances of people asking relationship advice from sycophant LLMs and thinking that the advice is “unbiased”.
Homeopathy is a good example. For an uneducated person it sounds convincing enough and yes, there are doctors prescribing homeopathic pills. I am still fascinated it still exists.
That’s actually a example of sth different. And as it’s basically a placebo it only harms people’s wallets (mostly). That cannot be said for random llm failure modes. And whether it can be prescribed by doctors depends very much on the country
Actually, swallowing a rock will almost certainly cause problems. Telling your state medical board that your doctor told you to take a rock will have a wildly different outcome than telling a judge that you swallowed one because ChatGPT told you to do so.
Unless the judge has you examined and found to be incompetent, they're most likely to just tell you that you're an idiot and throw out the case.
I once met with a person who used to be a vice president in a major US bank. I was impressed, until much later when I discovered that there were three thousand “vice presidents” in that bank.