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At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.

Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.

You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.

The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.


The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.

At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.

That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.


"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."

If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?


It's perfectly possible to be trustworthy in one thing and not the other. If you can't trust a lion with your flock of sheep doesn't mean you can't trust it with a bunch of bananas.

yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.

This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.

My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.


If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.

You should be fired if you're having an affair with a spy, or with someone who reports to you.

How do you know you aren’t?

By not having an affair with anyone?

The problem is, that's just your opinion.

That's not settled law.

Which is why corporations like these don't want to run the risk.


Are there realistic ways of harvesting vegetables at scale that are underneath mounted solar panels, with all their supports?

Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?

I'm just imagining that you are going to need a lot of vertical clearance for tractors, and support posts will have to be widely spaced enough that the horizontal beams supporting the panels will have to be quite strong, and that at some point this is less solar panels in a field, and more like constructing a building with solar panels on its roof.


> Or is the idea that there aren't now, but they could be built?

It's hard to see how this would work well with corn, since corn is pretty tall, corn harvesters are pretty huge, and putting panels even high enough for a different set of smaller, realistic harvesters would still require supports that I can't imagine would be cost effective given all the other hurdles they would cause.

Other crops like cotton, alfalfa, and hay aren't as tall, but have the same harvesting problems.

Most harvesting efficiency gains are directly tied to GIGANTIC machines. Farming is insanely efficient and competitive. It's hard to see how smaller machines could be viable and no one would have discovered it until this tech.

I'd guess there is far more potential in grazing land (unrelated to this tech), which is already actively being developed at scale.


The good news is that as someone else pointed out, we mostly grow corn for energy, so in a way, this is more about getting the ground we use for corn back than it is getting more energy.

We are right at the point where fully automated harvesting machines start to gain ground. And removing the operator (or moving the operator outside the machine) allows for designs that are less tall. The benefit of wider and wider machines also shrinks with full automation, even if it doesn't fully go away

You can see there are already huge examples of this in Australia with sheep grazing under panels and it's just barely starting in New York state with a cornell pilot. In my opinion it's the future of electricity in agricultural areas.

Smaller scale market gardens could benefit. Many rely on more manual labor and smaller machines.

There are some small organic farms using a system of chained paper pots and frames to quickly fill them with soil and sow with seeds, then once they're sprouted you use a hand pulled machine that spreads the chain out while directly placing each plant into the soil automatically.


Depends on what the crop is. Broccoli I imagine, is manually cut. same with tomatoes.


Exactly. I've recently been training a number of models, and the value to any potential competitor would be approximately zero.

It's so integrated with the specific inputs of my product, and the outputs that it needs, that the model just has no value to anyone else.

If a competitor needed such a model, they need to train their own that matches the form of their inputs and outputs, which is just going to be different.


As long as your training data itself isn't sensitive. If that's e.g. photos of products and you're training a quality assurance photo recognition software, that's probably fine, if it's unredacted support tickets, not fine.

You can process your data through some learned feature extractor offline first, just to be sure.

I used to work at a company who used to do this, but I'd argue that it almost never does what you want re: concealing the input space. There are so many ways to recover the input space from the latents, and often they are constructed expressly to contain exactly enough information to do precisely that.

But how much effort would that require? ... is what I was going to say but in this age of "claude reverse engineer this doohickey" maybe the better question is how much compute and how many tokens it would require.

It's really quite the opposite.

Large firms have a much harder time hiding that kind of behavior, and they have much more to lose.

Large firms require processes and controls around everything. If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know, it's part of engineering designs, and a whistleblower is going to leak it to the press.

And then Amazon is going to lose all of its business customers once its privacy guarantees were shown to be intentionally circumvented.

It is simply not economically rational for a company like Amazon or OpenAI to look at the data of its corporate customers.

Regular consumers are a different story, because you need to respond to abuse, illegal activity, etc. So they don't have the same privacy guarantees.

But corporate customers, that stuff is watertight. No cloud provider is going to risk losing their entire business because they violated their privacy guarantees.


> If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know, it's part of engineering designs, and a whistleblower is going to leak it to the press

An awful lot of this sort of thing in the corporate world is based on pinky-promises and legal threats, more than on robust technical controls.

Every production system I have ever seen has at least one set of dev-accessible keys that has access to the production DB. Mature systems at least had audit logging around who retrieved those keys, less mature systems often didn't have any kind of internal access logs.

Is "Amazon the corporate entity" snooping on your data? Absolutely not. Is someone with Amazon internal access snooping on your data? You'll never know either way.


That's exactly how amazon decides what becomes an amazon basics product.

AWS has also strip mined open-source software, elasticsearch, redis, mongo, browser rendering tools, etc.


Given that even non-Amazon vendors can use Amazon.com search features to discover bestselling products from third-party sellers in various categories, I doubt there's anything contractually prohibiting Amazon from using the same information to drive their own product mix.

Same goes for selling prices. Published retail prices are not trade secrets.


> If Amazon is peeking into corporate customers' data, then there have to be mechanisms designed to allow that, a whole bunch of people know

According to this comment, they did have a mechanism and a process for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929959

Yet it seems to have had negligible impact on their ability to obtain and retain customers.


Agreed -- I only do 2 active things at a time, and maybe something third that is long-running in the background (like training a model or classifying thousands of files, where I just need to check in occasionally to make sure it hasn't veered off-track).

It's rare that with my 2 active things, they're both busy, since one usually finishes while I'm drafting my reply to the other.

When it occasionally happens that both are busy for the next 5 min, I just get to enjoy the break and stretch my legs and walk to the kitchen or something.


> It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.

This is really not true. Spies are just people, there aren't that many of them, and they don't come "customized". The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.

What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.

Obviously spies exist, like here, but she's just... a normal woman who has a job as a spy and tried to seduce him and succeeded. He may have turned down five others who failed miserably in their attempts.

And sure they try to put together a psychological profile of the person, but that's also not really rocket science, and it's going to be pretty basic stuff. "Your weaknesses" is not going to be that exciting. Maybe he's really into expensive wines. It's not like he has a secret gambling addiction.

So let's just keep this reality-based and not fantasy-based.


> The overlap of effective spies and "the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world" is very close to zero.

The overlap doesn’t have to be that great. The spies are also not random you don’t get random spies matching with random CEOs. They just have to have enough available agents and enough info on the target, physical proximity, and other factors to attempt something to work out. In many cases it’s not something that will be in the news either. It will be just a failed attempt, or just an affair.


Realistically speaking, there's a good chance the affair probably happened first, and then the MSS got involved second.

Even the most powerful people can be really dumb.


> Even the most powerful people can be really dumb

"even"? Barring the fact that power makes you dumber, those in power at least for the last ~40 years or so had been actually selected to be dumber

mr. Huang case here is a shining example


>> not fantasy-based

A nerd thinking a woman is into them...that is the fantasy...No she did not happen to bump into you in the elevator, and no she is not there to attend the same AWS conference that you... and oh no... she does NOT happen to like the same SciFi you do ...and no ...you are not ohh so funny...

That


> What you are describing is conspiracy-theory thinking or the kind of stuff you see in James Bond movies. Not real life.

This is literally a state actor running sexpionage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexpionage).


Yes, this is real sexpionage. Not the Hollywood fantasy described upthread. The scenario described is not what has played out in reality.

What part of that struck you as fantasy?

Again, this isn't some low-level clerk that just needs a handjob or some Grindr kompromat--this is the CEO of the second largest company in the world by market cap.

Is it the assertion was that they'll do research on you (which is why having a gambling problem, large debts, or lying during a clearance interview is an issue)?

Is it the assertion that they'll pick a very pretty woman instead of some plain-looking one (which is why historically the NKVD recruited from theater and ballet schools)?

The "Hollywood fantasy" is real, it just happens in a vanishingly small set of cases.

For a truly bizarre version (even stranger than this!), see the case of Shi Pei Pu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Pei_Pu).


This part. Not the research, not that they may be attractive. The part where they're supernaturally sculpted and emphatically unimaginably irresistible.

> They will employ the most sweet and the most pleasurable and gorgeous honey that there is in the world to create the perfect Honey trap.

> Normal people just can not imagine how sweet, specially when it has been customised around your needs and desires.

> It is not just a woman wanting to have sex with you. It will be the woman in your dreams.

I appreciate the link to Shi Pei Pu, that was an interesting read! Less strange than a literal Greek siren, but much stranger than the truth of Jensen's situation.


This seems entirely reasonable to me. And to people complaining that this is censorship, it is absolutely not. You can still type these words just fine, it's just not going to interpret swipes that are inherently probabilistic and often ambiguous as potentially risky terms.

This seems like a feature, because I swipe all the time and send messages without realizing I got a word wrong, especially because the word it chooses is usually with the same first letter and approximately same length.

All this is doing is avoiding high-risk words and terms, and making you type them out letter by letter to ensure you aren't sending an accidentally sexual/swear/political message to your Mom/boss/colleague.

This would be problematic and censorship if it were preventing you from typing the phrases at all. It's clearly a helpful feature, however, to prevent you from accidentally typing risky phrases when using something as error-prone as swipe typing.


"imessage isn't working"? really?

I'll give you that one. I'd missed that in the article. That just seems like bad taste on Apple's part.

But still, the overall idea seems like it does more good than harm to the end user. I really don't think it is making anybody change their mind about what they ultimately type and communicate.


Yeah I'm all for the keyboard stopping me accidentally typing insults into work emails, but that just feels like someone's taking liberties

I really can't think of any others. Which is why RealPage has been so newsworthy.

If you have examples of such a company in other industries, please share.


RealPage isn't even the only one in its industry:

https://imgur.com/a/RR2vWnJ

  AUTOMATIC PRICE UPDATES

  New pricing information automatically pushes  to marketing website and ILS listings in real  time.

  During a six month study  with an Entrata client  using Entrata Pricing,  market rents grew 15%  more than a comparable  set of properties within  the same company.
Their marketing documents admitted to the exact same behavior.

No one cared about those of us hurt by this company to even bother filing a lawsuit against them.


I mean we all have chatgpt now:

  Industry          Companies
  ----------------  --------------------------------------
  Apartments        RealPage, Yardi, Rentana, Entrata
  Hotels            IDeaS, Duetto, RoomPriceGenie
  Airlines          PROS, Amadeus
  Grocery           Revionics, Yieldigo, Competera
  Retail            Pricefx, Omnia Retail, Wiser Solutions
  E-commerce        Prisync, Price2Spy, Intelligence Node
  Manufacturing     Zilliant, Vendavo
  Vacation rentals  PriceLabs, Beyond, Wheelhouse
  Events/tickets    DynamO Pricing, Digonex

It's pretty bold to name the price fixing software Pricef(i)x

You've never used salary data at a work place?

Companies like Radford collect salary information aggregated and sell it to other companies trying to set salary levels for similar roles.

These companies buying services from Radford are indirectly colluding through Radford, just like RealPage.


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