I really appreciate that your response to being interviewed by an idiot is to write, not an angry rant, but an educational blog post. You are a good person and they didn't deserve you.

Having worked with Nik in the past, yes he is a great person and one of the best. Any company missing out on him is genuinely foolish

> So what’s the Pentagon’s plan...?

The part of the Pentagon that did this is, to put it politely, not the part that's good at planning.

> And of course let’s not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical PRs. What’s even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too.

What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather than spamming GitHub.

You're gonna be really unhappy with how domain name registrars work, then.

I am very unhappy with domain name registrars for the same reasons. This is where most of my options on the topic were born.

Those aren’t “secret”, they’re obviously borrowed from rsh — oh that’s right, I’m old.

And these days you need to pass "-O" to scp to have it behave like rcp.

I'm pretty sure the ~ command style came from cu(1) which had it in at least 4.1BSD. I don't think rsh (which came in 4.2BSD) ever had such commands.

Whoops -- I meant rlogin. That had ~. and ~^Z. But you're right, rlogin got them from cu! (I'm not that old. :) )

Laughs in uucp!bangpath.

Somehow we have more public “discourse” than ever with less public “debate” than ever. People just yelling rude names at each other and repeating nonsense talking points, while the trajectory of what’s actually happening continues to worsen. I include Congress and the executive branch in this characterization.

I regret that I have but one vote to give to this comment.

It seems like at least half of what everyone consumes in all of 'social media' is 'politicized' but no one is interested in debating. Debating would have to mean we're talking to those gross people from the opposite 'team,' asking them to justify the policy they are advocating for, listening to them, and trying to convince them of our own positions.

When was the last time we witnessed any politicians or activists trying to change minds? Right-wingers scream dumb slogans like "They're sending the rapists over here!" and left-wingers scream back their own dumb lines like "Racist! America was built by immigrants!" And both sides dismiss the other side's arguments as the nonsensical ravings of the evil and/or stupid.

It's pointless. Very few people will be convinced by arguments. Refuting someone's entire belief system will not lead them to reevaluate their lives and follow us as though we were Jesus. This just doesn't happen.

The reason for this is people believe things without actually thinking about them. People manage to believe in things that are mutually exclusive. Debating them will just make them hate you for your air of superiority.

Discourse is useful for validating one's own beliefs. Throw ideas out there and if others can't refute them then they are probably good ideas. I don't think there is any other use.

What a depressing take. The whole reason we put 435 people in the same room (well, plus 100 people in another room) to run the lawmaking process was for them to convince each other with arguments. If we're going to make decisions based exclusively on who can yell generalized slurs the loudest, we're completely doomed.

Politicians don't convince each other via logical arguments, they convince each other with leverage, favors and all sorts of secret underhanded backroom deals. That's how power works.

I know it's a depressing take. It's a depressing world. And it's only getting worse. We're in an age where truth is essentially irrelevant if not actively detrimental to whatever cause any given person believes in.

And half or more depending on the platform are foreign agents and/or bots to continue stirring shit up. It’s sadly too easy and the platforms themselves promote that engagement.

Imagine how far we are from allowing our own stances to change for the purpose of finding out the truth that would benefit us all

> “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy

Wow, what a terrible, yet perhaps inadvertently accurate, metaphor.

Not all instruments are limited to a fixed set of pitches. A good classical string player micro-adjusts each individual note to adapt to its harmonic context. For example, making all the thirds and fifths sound good even when the key changes, or adjusting a leading tone up or down very slightly to make it even more leading.

Another way to think of it is that they have to hit every pitch without assistance from the instrument anyway, so they learn to make every note sound “good” rather than hitting a mathematically defined frequency.

This sensitivity to intonation is why all the great quartet composers were either deaf, Hungarian, or both.

fretless and continuous instruments are not confined to 12-TET

Yes! If you broaden your scope beyond “Western diatonic” you get even more opportunity. “Why can’t you tune your Turkish microtonal guitar” would also be an interesting follow-up.

I have a hard time with this separation of “principle” from “people”. Isn’t it people who have principles?

Easier to remain in the industry if you are shittalking principles instead of people.

yep - it really softens your actions, which in this case seem like a big step. So if you respect the people, why didn't you stay? or if you disagree this strongly with their actions, how can you still respect them?

I get that there's nuance, but this feels like they want to make a big ethical stand without burning any bridges. You can have one of those.

There are people I've worked with who I'll never worth with again. There are others I'd be willing to work with if they got their act together.

"If you disagree this strongly with their actions, how can you still respect them?" is a decent description of the latter.

“It’s not X, it’s Y” is a common ChatGPT trope used to give a sense of depth to a statement but the specific contrast is generally murky like this. This Tweet was either written by ChatGPT or heavily influenced by ChatGPT style.

Seeing as the guy worked at OpenAI maybe it's the other way around?

Not a guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlin_Kalinowski

Sorry, too late to edit!

There are no "principles" in big tech and I call bullshit on this tweet and their reasoning.

OpenAI already had military contracts while this employee was at the company and there was no open letter last year about that.

Prior to that, they were at Meta and joined OpenAI after ChatGPT took off.

If they thought that AGI was about "principles" then not only they were naive, but it leads me to believe that they were only there for the RSUs, just like their time at Meta.

Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money, fame and RSUs and not for so called "AGI"?

> Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money...

Because then you miss opportunities like this in which to market yourself. A kind of hedging your bets in order to get more money and/or stay out of jail if the winds change. (Jail can be expensive.)

Or it could be honest cognitive dissonance.

It's not that complicated... People have much more depth and sides than one particular idea or principle that they have (specially if you don't know all the context that force them to chose one decsion over another). I'm sure Sam in many ways he's also a great person, so in that case you judging the idea and not the person.

Off topic, but… “For the oldest amongst us this kind of lessons came from 37Signals…books Rework and Getting Real”. So the “oldest among us” are what, 40?