Literally declaring yourself the winner of an election that you solidly lost and then repeating that claim over and over again as your supporters rile themselves up and prepare for violence abso-fucking-lutely qualifies. If the election really was stolen (it wasn't), then violence on a grand scale would be more than justified (it's not), so pushing a false claim to that effect when you have as much power to make it stick is one of the most directly violent acts that can be committed.
"This election was stolen" is way more dangerous than "Fire!" in a crowded theater because if the bullshit sticks then you actually end up with war.
Your comment really could do double duty, describing the last four years, where we've been told ad nauseum "Russian Hackers" armed with Facebook ads, kept Hillary Clinton out of the Whitehouse. Essentially, stealing "her turn".
Don't forget GA - Dems won full control, and will now have at least some ability to legislate. So Twitter et al need to be thinking about how to get ahead of the complaints that the left has against section 230 (the left hates it because they are not forced to aggressively moderate, the right hates it because they are allowed to moderate at all). This was not looking likely to be something they had to worry about until the surprise sweep in Georgia, so I'd argue that may have played as big a role as the craziness in DC.
Yeah, so much of Google's culture is already about slowing down work so that it takes 10 (5 eng ICs + lead, analyst, manager, PM and PgM) to do the work that 2 engineers would do with identical quality in any other company, and the old-timers are the absolute worst in terms of keeping that status quo in place. I can't recall seeing a single team there that was properly sized and wouldn't function better with half the team and an eighth of the process.
There's a good argument to be made that a big chunk of the value of an engineer to Google is strategic, simply that they
are locked up and aren't working at FB, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. I was never at a high enough level to have a view into the data that would confirm that, but it certainly felt like even if you weren't particularly productive in the environment everyone up the ladder was perfectly happy to let you malinger on the payroll forever, as long as you weren't so bad that you did damage to someone's pristine art project of a codebase. So maybe inability to fire isn't really such an issue - even now, seeing anyone fired at Google, let alone an old timer, is extraordinarily rare.
If you make these things Big Process, each of which requires spreadsheets and certification by high level manager and weeks of delay, etc, then yes, people will think of them as meaningless hoops. If you can avoid dumb red tape then things can go quite well.
In games, when QA reports into the same person managing the product, things run smoothly and everyone remains aligned towards shipping a good product. When it's a separate org that loans people out and has OKRs that don't connect to individual products, they become horrible trolls who are only out to fuck the product up by submitting so many bug reports that it can never be released. Sim with whole-company legal teams ("never ship anything, we might get sued") and shared security ("never run services or we might get hacked") and ops ("never use servers or they might crash"). Alignment is everything.
I personally just think everything works better when the best people are in charge and rewarded for being the best. Yes, there's tons of luck, and it's not fair in any "everyone deserves a shot" sense. Still a better strategy, because most people are bad at most things. We should take care of them, but we should not pretend they're competent if they're not.
> I personally just think everything works better when the best people are in charge and rewarded for being the best.
The problem is that they're not necessarily the best i.e. some poor person if given the same resources, education, access etc. might in fact do a lot better with what they have, we'll just never know.
I mean if you look at the state of today's world, handling of COVID, shams like Nikola etc. are these really the 'best' people humanity has to offer?
There can be and often are, because it's important to account for future expected flows - credit that's been extended and is due to be repaid, for instance, has to be accounted for. The thing is, these flows should be clearly and cleanly separated from actual cash on hand.
> IA will also remain quite essential, because for the foreseeable future, computers will not be able to match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-world situations.
I broadly agree with what this article says, but depending how you define "foreseeable future" I find this to be a dangerously naive viewpoint that just assumes nothing will change quickly.
I'm not stupid enough to say abstract reasoning about the real world is a simple problem or right around the corner, but there's no evidence so far to indicate it's much further off than, say, object recognition was when Minsky (or more likely Papert, apparently?) assigned it as an undergrad project. We pour exponentially more money into research each year, and have more and better hardware to run it on. We're going to hit the ceiling soon re: power consumption, sure, but some libraries are starting to take spiking hardware seriously which will open things up a few orders of magnitude. There are dozens of proposed neural architectures which could do the trick theoretically, they're just way too small right now (similar to how useless backprop was when it was invented).
Are we a Manhattan Project or three away from it? Sure. That's not nothing, but we're also pouring so much money into the boring and immediately commercializable parts of the field (all the narrow perception-level and GAN can that NeurIPS is gunked up with) that if any meaningful part of that shifted to the bigger problems, we'd see much faster progress. That will happen in a massive way once someone does for reasoning what transformers did for text prediction: just show that it's tractable.
Two monitors doesn't work great for me because I always feel like one is "primary" and one "secondary", where all the crap like Slack and email that distracts me goes, which just hurts productivity.
I switched to an ultrawide, and though it's about the same amount of screen space I tend to organize it differently, keeping mostly on-task stuff visible. It's real nice to have 3 tabs of related code and an iOS simulator running as well as a console without having to tab switch.
Twitter's CEO is basically an absentee leader, time-splitting with his other company which actually makes money and spending his free hours sucking up to rappers because he is desperate not to appear as an uncool white guy. Is it any shock that their strategy is garbage?
Damn right. I saw a picture of him recently and he looks like a bum. That’s what happens when they brainwash you into thinking you should be ashamed of what you are.
"This election was stolen" is way more dangerous than "Fire!" in a crowded theater because if the bullshit sticks then you actually end up with war.