AFAIK a lot of these ideas are not new (the JSON thing was done with OS models before) and OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?), so I think this is actually all within expectations.
Their web UI was a glitchy mess for over a year. Rollouts of just data is staggered and often delayed. They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately, even though others have figured this out ages ago. There are global outages regularly. Etc…
I’m impressed by some aspects of their rapid growth, but these are financial achievements (credit due Sam) more than technical ones.
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Not sure why you are being downvoted. You are generally right. Most of their new product rollouts were acoompanied with huge production instabilities for paying customers. Only in the most recent ones did they manage that better.
> They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately
Strict mode for structured output fixes at least this though.
> OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?)
It depends on how you define startup but I don't think they will surpass Uber, ByteDance, or SpaceX until this next rumored funding round.
I'm excluding companies that have raised funding post IPO since that's an obvious cutoff for startups. The other cuttof being break even, in which case Uber has raised well over $20 billion.
> Since AI vision is not yet good enough, it’s possible that one reason the AIs do relatively poorly on this new test is because the verbal descriptions of the questions are not written as well as they could be, and further research could include multiple wordings of the questions, written by different people, to get a sense of how sensitive the AIs are to how the questions are described.
A more parsimonious theory might be that it had the other IQ test in its training set.
Still, even at that it's an impressive result; it having an actual IQ if about 100 would already be pretty substantial.
That's why Canada also is one of the worst countries in G8 and maybe the most mediocre countries when it comes to actual startup investment and building something new for the world and growing the share of the pie. On top of that, they have a horrible system where nobody can get a doctor. Everybody has to pay double to get a block of butter and housing is so high that you get a whole neighborhood in the US for that price.
That is why the countries like uk canada and also Europe are incredibly poor.
Trust me I spent a huge portion of my life there. The reason why I speak so much against Canada these days is because the country is delusional. Nobody wants to take any risks and yet they think things will always fall into place for them.
>why the countries like uk canada and also Europe are incredibly poor
They are not that poor if you adjust for cost of living and hours worked. If you look at the Wikipedia thing "GDP per working hour (2019 US$ PPP)" some results are:
Denmark 76
USA 74
Canada 57
Spain 56
UK 54
So the pay isn't that much worse per hour. People probably work a little less over here, maybe because we don't have the whole if you don't work you won't get health cover and will be doomed thing.
Also life expectancy is 76 years in the US vs 84 years in Spain. There's more to life than working all hours then croaking.
I don't think that social mobility can be measured statistically, because it depends on people actually trying. I actually think that the UK does have fairly high social mobility _but_ the vast majority of people get stuck in local maxima, and the laws are influenced by that (e.g. stuff like obsession with the mediocre outcome).
Having said that, the index you've pasted is complete bollocks. I don't know what they are measuring but it has nothing to do with what I would consider social mobility (e.g. ability to move into a different social class or perhaps earn a significantly different amount to your parents). The factors they use seem super focused on socialist policies which I don't think have anything to do with mobility.
Interesting that you consider it socialist, because the World Economic Forum has often been considered as the embodiment of neoliberalism. Around 2000, when there were huge anti-globalization protests by left / green / anarchist activists around the world, WEF was one of the primary targets.
I think that the main issue is that it tries to come up with a metric that works across every country which is basically pointless because a lot of them are failed states where income information isn't reliable or meaningful.
So they come up with stuff like "how high is teenage pregnancy" and "what is the male female work balance" which they define as being proxies for social mobility I assume because if you have five kids at age 20 and you're forced to stay at home then you have none.
The problem is that it just introduces a billion ways to influence the actual rankings, they are value judgements.
If you look at well functioning countries only, then you can pretty much look at how many people in the bottom decile of parental household income end up in the top decile of household income.
You still have the issue though that this only tells you how the distribution actually ends up, not how it _could_ look in a specific country if everyone actually tried their hardest to climb the social/financial ladder.
How many EU countries did you work in those 50 years?
Come to Austria and you'll see non-competes everywhere and they're enforceable since they're legal by federal labor/employment law since the private industry lobbied for them because quote "employees taking IP knowledge with them is the biggest threat to employers, bigger than industrial espionage".
In other EU companies you can find them too but they might not be enforceable if they're not backed up by local laws in those countries so always check local laws before doubting over non competes in contracts.
Indeed thy are but there are so many aspects that it's quite difficult to compare with the US. You have duration limits, salary conditions, special situations in which it might be effective, proof of damage, and in any case, it is not allowed to block the employer from working. So like the meme: yes, but actually no.
In the news I mostly see or hear about the non-adjusted gender pay gap (women earn 17-21% less than men). The adjusted pay gap, which takes hours worked into account, is only 1-5% [0].
the issue is that if you are 10% less experienced than someone else because you took a year out of your career (imagining two people who started working 10 years ago), it is hard.
Climbing the ladder has inertia, anyone taking a sabbatical will be hugely adversely affected.
We should however destigmatise men taking parental leave in order to readjust this.
I will point out, however, that our society still prefers that men pay more than their share and many women have reported being uncomfortable out earning their partner. Obviously these conditions cannot coexist.
There's one thing you're missing here, and that is as women make up a larger percentage of an occupations' workforce, the wages start to go down with it, which is what happened or is happening with e.g. doctors and teachers.
Do you really expect employers to use their increased bargaining power in favour of workers? Of course doubling the number of workers in an industry is going to lower wages.
How are you relating this to the thread? Maybe you mean it takes time for capital to lower everyone’s income when market competition increases, the actual details of the excess humans matter less and less each year.
Artificial protection and gatekeeping by ordinance are there to protect those who got there first. Then we can blame others: women or immigrants etc, for wage depression. Unions do this less but still favor those who organized first.
If capital gets to hire for less, say that. Maybe the opportunity was an increase in certain pop segments, but they dont make wages go down. The people who pay wages do.
Which is also why a lot of the latest policies are to provide equal maternity and paternity leave. Which is pretty good anyways, why shouldn’t fathers be able to take as much time off?
If your goal is gender equality, though, it needs to be equal, and we should encourage fathers to take the full time off as well. Otherwise, from an employer's perspective, women are ultimately lower-value employees, because they have an additional pool of time off they can utilize, while men do not.
Balancing that out gives one less reason to favor one gender over the other when it comes to hiring and assigning a salary.
One thing is the leave shouldn’t be “all at once or lose it” but a bucket that can be drained over time. The mother can use it very early and the father later which provides the best experience for everyone.
What if women are higher-value stay-at-home parents than men? Then maybe the optimal equilibrium is reached by more maternity leave taken on average by women than paternity leave taken by men… which produces an inverse result in the workplace.
It all hinges on whether or not sex/gender (and everything that comes with it) makes you more likely to enjoy and/or excel in certain roles. My gut feeling is it does.
If it does, then the goal of that kind of equality is a false goal.
It would be best if we gave parents the choice to determine what split is best for children themselves.
Right now, there isn’t really choice, because few countries have had equal leave rights, and those that do have had them for such a relatively short amount of time that we have no idea. So we haven’t been able to test any sort of hypothesis at all. All we have is culturally bound gut feelings, but if we just listened to those then we would still think that there are only four elements, that the earth is flat, etc.
And in the US we don’t even have legally mandated paid maternity leave, so even that would be a start.
No, that is not the kind of equality this discussion is about.
In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.
It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.
That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".
I read the thread more closely and, you’re right, if men are not allowed to take the same amount of paternity leave as women, then that should be changed so that any person can take the same amount of parental leave. I didn’t realize that was not the case (I don’t live in the States). I was responding more directly to the notion that men should be encouraged to take the full leave / same amount of leave as women.
There is a lot of cultural pressure around men taking leave even if it is available.
Shinjirō Koizumi caused controversy when he took two weeks of his family leave as a minister because Japanese men never take it due to cultural reasons even though they are legally entitled to a full year of paternal leave. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/asia/japan-koizumi-paternity-...
And he was the son of a former prime minister, so even he was not powerful enough to be immune from criticism of this kind
While the details differ, the social benefit are mostly similar for both maternity and paternity leave. It create a better bond between parents and child, resulting in children that grow up more healthy and productive for society. Parental bonding take times.
I'd perfer to see many positions within STEM so neither of us can cherrypick.
Do you have a real article with real data? This is just a post by some person on LinkedIn. It doesn't provide any background or support for the claims given. It even misuses the aggregate wage gap number from the BLS to apply at the job level...
"The term “gender pay gap” describes the disparity between what men and women earn in the workforce. Women earn, on average, 82% less than men do in the same job in the United States."
Perhaps you have some data from an authority like the BLS?
Somehow we did just fine without fractional reserve system. And historically loaning money with interest was considered a great sin. So manufacturing can exist without any modern finance but modern finance can't exist when it's not backed by the 'real' economy.
The industrial revolution was (partially) enabled by finance. Especially Scotland managed to catch up so much with England during that time, because it had a better and more robust financial system.
I bring up the industrial revolution, because manufacturing before the industrial revolution existed, but with such low productivity that I am sure you wouldn't want to go back to that state.
I'm not sure the notion that interest was considered a sin by some people at some point in time carries much weight. First, have a look at all the other things considered great sins. Second, banks in the European middle ages did functionally earn interest income, they just used techniques that should be familiar to any modern tax optimiser or even sanction buster to officially call is something else.
One technique was to charge late fees. Technically as a debtor, you could pay your loan back on time at 0%, but if you ever wanted another loan, you better be fashionable late and pay your interest disguised as a late fee.
Another technique was to give you the loan in one currency and have you pay back in another. Then you can disguise the interest payments in the exchange rate.
There's also plenty of examples involving shenanigans with derivatives.
Have a look at modern Muslim finance for more examples.
So that golden age of no interest never really existed to begin with.
I don't buy your arguments that industrial revolution wouldn't happened without banking system. Industrialization of the Soviet Union is a prime example, Soviets pulled it off on a massive scale without any shenanigans with the debts and whatnot. You yourself actually proving this stating that the semi-modern banking with loans with interest already existed in the Middle Ages yet the industrial revolution only really kicked off in the XIX century. Industrial revolution was driven by the progress of science (steam machines, electric motors etc) and would have happened without any modern banking anyway. Pooling money of individual investors for great infrastructure projects like railways or factories etc. doesn't require any debt or bank mediation, in fact the entire idea of a corporation as we know know where investors are shielded from the liability doesn't need banking system at all to function just fine. And such investments were the most common of financing industrial projects during the peak of the industrialization, along side with the direct government subsidies, not banking loans
Be careful: are we talking about The Industrial Revolution, or later copy-cats?
Unlike the inventions of agriculture which happened multiple times independently, The Industrial Revolution happened only once and then spread.
It's still debated amongst historians and economists what factors caused The Industrial Revolution to happen in Britain when it did, and not earlier or later or elsewhere.
We know a bit more about what factors help or hinder copy-cat industrialisers. Just because we have more examples to study. You bring up a few yourself.
Btw, I never made the argument that you absolutely need a reasonable financial system to have any kind of industrialisation. I would argue that such a system helps with prosperity, but is not absolutely required.
(One good example that you didn't mention is actually the US. They got quite prosperous despite absolutely hobbling their financial system throughout all of their short history. See eg their bans on branch banking, and obsession with unit banks.)
But all else being equal, I'd rather live in a more prosperous society than the Soviet Union, which barely managed to industrialize at great cost and largely thanks to oil money.
> Maybe the fact that you need the physical, manufactured goods to live a comfortable life unlike 'financial services', that won't cloth you, won't transport you and definitively won't feed you.
Thanks to the division of labour, the tailor doesn't have to drive a car, nor does the bus driver have to make her own clothes. Similarly, people can work in a bank and trade to acquire clothing and transportation.
If they are particularly good at providing banking services, they will be able to acquire a bigger bundle of those manufactured resources than if they worked the factories themselves.
Just like the tailor can get more bus rides with less hassle by selling clothing, then by getting behind the wheel herself.
Btw, what do you have against fractional reserve banking? It seems to universally spring up in anything remotely resembling a free market. Systems with 100% reserves only ever exist when governments interfere, and even then only briefly, because they are brittle. See eg https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-flashback-state-100-percent...
You make some good points. Yes, Soviet Union didn't 'invent' industrialization, just copied what was already well known and didn't need to go through the pains of incremental improvements and some dead ends in science etc. and instead could just look up to the already industrialized Western countries to see what works and what doesn't. You are however wrong stating that they did it thanks to oil money. They didn't trade any oil with the West till the late 60s and by then they already started their decline.
Regarding the financial services, I acknowledge that they are useful, my problem with them is that they disconnected from the real economy and instead of being a tool subservient to the needs of that economy they started to live on their own and even enslave big swaths of the actual economy. That is simply not sustainable, sooner or later the countries that actually produce real products decide that they don't need a third party skimming off top of their work and develop their own finance sector and then you are left with nothing, there's no _sustainable_ wealth creation by slushing money around between different banks and accounts, the money needs to be put to some _productive_ use. Some tiny countries can survive as tax heavens but it's a very precarious situation and can change over night. Sure you can have one Switzerland, but it's just an exception related to specific history, you really can't have two Switzerland-like countries living off finance, there's simply no room for that.
My beef with the fractional reserve is that it is too easy to abuse it. The idea is sound and good, it works nice and makes everyone more wealthy as long as the money creation is kept in line with the growth of the economy. But that's not the case in practice. That's the problem. Countries start pumping in 'empty' money into the system to paper over structural problems, but then these issues come back with double force to bite in the ass.
Singapore does fine as a 'second Switzerland'. So I'm not sure where you get the notion that there can be only one Switzerland-like country? (Hong Kong was in a similar boat for quite a while, but it has decreased in importance lately. Not because the global economy didn't want finance any more, but mostly because of PRC mismanagement.)
If NYC or London were independent countries, they would be in similar situations. They even have similar population numbers as the financial centres mentioned above.
When has a financial centre ever imploded overnight? Especially where that was not due to internal mismanagement, but due to shifts in the outside economy? (Though even with plenty of mismanagement, Hong Kong is still around as an important financial centre. Just not as important as before, and the decline has been slow.)
Amsterdam was once a more important financial centre, but its relatively decline has also been slow.
> The idea is sound and good, it works nice and makes everyone more wealthy as long as the money creation is kept in line with the growth of the economy.
I agree that government should be kept out of the money creation business. Private note issuing banks tend to do better. See George Selgin's work for more.
> Countries start pumping in 'empty' money into the system to paper over structural problems, but then these issues come back with double force to bite in the ass.
I am not sure what you are talking about here. You mention countries, so I assume you are talking about a system with a central bank?
Well as long as the central bank makes sure inflation (or nominal GDP) stay on target, the problem you describe just doesn't exist.
> Regarding the financial services, I acknowledge that they are useful, my problem with them is that they disconnected from the real economy and instead of being a tool subservient to the needs of that economy they started to live on their own and even enslave big swaths of the actual economy.
I'm not sure how this enslaving is supposed to happen.
OK, again, you make good points about Singapore being like a second Switzerland. But what I was trying to convey initially is that such countries are like oversized tax heavens. Combined population of both is what, 10 million? Compared to 8 billion humans living in this world. That was my point. How many more countries can you convert to live off finance? It's a niche, a very cozy one for sure, but it's not something that would be globally applicable. And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital.
The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries. This term has already well known meaning which you can look-up to get a good description because I'm afraid I can't articulate it good enough. But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
Finance is one example of a service based industry. Tourism is another, and there are plenty of countries with extensive tourism industries. There's also healthcare, hospitality in general, media, education, etc.
> And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital. The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries.
There are basically two ways to use other people's money: via debt or via equity. Those other people would either be your creditors or your shareholders.
When people use 'slavery' metaphors in the context of finance, they usually mean to say that debtors are the slaves of the creditors. You seem to imply that the notion is the other way round? That's somewhat peculiar.
For 'financialisation', I am going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization and it doesn't seem particularly scary. Though different people seem to mean very different things by that word. Eg the introduction talks about increasing debt-to-equity ratios.
If you are worried about those ratios, ie about leverage, one targeted change you could make is to remove the tax advantage that debt enjoys over equity: companies typically get to pay interest with pre-tax dollars and have to pay dividends with post-tax dollars.
If you want companies to use relatively more equity and less debt, you should remove that subsidy of debt.
> But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
How do you 'destroy' an 'industrial base for short-term gains'? Usually a short term focus in the economy means that interest rates are high. But I'm not quite sure how that fits here.
I get your grievances about Germany, but alimony/child support laws can turn out much worse than that in many parts of the anglosphere. Bad bureaucracy is also hardly unique to Germany.
The tax thing I do get. Especially if you are not a migrant it can be a tough ask to give away 40-50% of your money, a lot of which goes directly or indirectly to pensioners who probably hate your guts. Though again, while this is particularly bad in Germany, it's hardly unique in that regard.
Exactly. That's why it's baffling to see them spend, what? 100-200? million dollars just on Joe Rogan, to then spend 0 dollars in podcast UI improvements.
I could imagine taking a Netflix-style approach perhaps, where you fund small-ish podcast producers and see what sticks. Perhaps develop a podcast-specific UI mode. Maybe create a monetization platform for podcasts (similar to Substack) so that you can attract talent and then extract the all-too-familiar XX% in platform fees?
I mean, I'm sure Spotify employees have thought of these things before, it's not like these ideas are revolutionary. But I see nothing that makes my Spotify subscription a must-have.
