I choose not to work at places like linked in, meta, or any place that accepts Saudi or Israeli funding. It makes it a little harder to find a job, but i sleep better at night.
Agree, having a strong moral compass is a must have yet becoming more and more important. Very easy to say, incredibly hard to execute when the offer is big enough...
For similar reasons, I have been working in the public sector (Australian state government) for the past 5 years and couldn’t be happier.
I’m lucky that I’m in a team which is hands on and does a lot of very interesting things. From building CRUD apps which are used in management and response to bushfires (wildfires) to more interesting things like building a datalake which amalgamates and stores weather data from multiple sources to building near real time CDC pipelines and making our transactional data available to our in house team of data scientists who then use that data to do fascinating stuff that eventually results in for example making sure that our response to bushfires takes into account the impact and safety of endangered species.
And when I look at the underlying data and the trends and and projections of just how bad bushfires are going to get in the next 30 years and how we must be so much nimbler and smarter just to survive, the work takes on a whole new level of meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, there are times the internal bureaucracy absolutely drives me mad. And I am aware that I could be earning much more in the private sector. But I get to work with a team who are really passionate and enthusiastic about their job, and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
If you had told the teenage Utilitarian me that I would one day work for, and enjoy working for, government, I would have thought hell must have frozen over.
> and I get to sleep at night knowing that unlike my previous jobs, this time I am not just making someone who is already uber rich, richer.
You can provide value in the free market, or you can work in a public sector where the people paying your salary have no choice but pay their taxes to cover your salary or risk going to prison.
Anyway, for those in this situation, some anecdotes. I've outright refused to do questionable things and kept my job. I've also played incompetent so the sharks look elsewhere. Point being... options exist, don't negotiate [only] with yourself.
Would be remiss if I missed the opportunity to quote Louis Rossman: "don't accept the premise of assholes"
There have been several spywares developed in Israel and that have been used by them and other governments against civilians, below are just a few examples. Why wouldn't you lump Israel in?
If your criterion holds for spyware merely developed in a state, then that commits you not working in the US or UK as well. Something to think about.
Putting that aside, my moral positions about Israel are rooted in the righteousness of the Jews' cause and their historical struggle. My personal self-righteousness is inadequate in comparison.
There is no incentive to work hard for most organizations. They will take credit for all your work and maybe give you a $1000 bonus at the end of the year, if they havent laid you off by that time.
You guys get bonuses?! I've been working for 15+ years (various organisations) and have never once seen a year-end bonus, or even heard of anyone getting one here.
Providers like OpenRouter default to the cheapest provider. They are often cheap because they are rediculously quantized and tuned for throughput, not quality.
This is probably kimi trying to protect their brand from bargain basement providers that dont properly represent what the models are capable of.
I'd take it at face value. Since they release open weights they would appear to genuinely want other providers to serve this as well as themselves, but the benefit of this depends on it being served accurately.
Kimi, GLM, and Minimax are the "Big Three" of open source Chinese AI startups. There's also Qwen and DeepSeek but they are all subsidized by other lines of business.
The Chinese AI models are generally 5-6 months behind high end SOTA western models (and as of the time of this comment it's Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking, it's rumored however that the Mythos and Spud codename models are even better).
To gain market share, the Chinese startup use open source as a distribution strategy and essentially made mid-high end AI a commodity. The best models are still Western but for any application that doesn't require the highest performance in the market or if there's a need for extensive customization or alignment (imagine if you are an oil rich petro state and you don't want your national AI strategy to be tied to liberal international order ideology).
It creates a lot of pricing pressure on the low and mid end, and it's also why Anthropic is desperately trying to go full B2B instead.
However if the third parties hosting the Chinese models at near cost doesn't perform good quality control, it ruins the strategy because customers are not inclined to use chinese models anymore (and first party hosting on chinese infrastructure is out of the question because of geopolitical reasons, so everybody hides behind the polite fiction of using resellers like OpenRouter, Fal.ai, Wavespeed, fireworks AI etc.).
I've been burned on openrouter getting routed through terrible quants with equally terrible quality. While paying maybe 15% less.
Nearly a year ago it was impossible to avoid it due to silly openrouter routing algorithm and the api. You had to set multiple things just right to make it work.
Similar to their other api quirks. You want valid json format response? sure, set response_format to "json" just like our documentation suggests. Oh, it only works some of the time? How silly, why would you expect it to work all of the time? If you want it to work more often, set require_params to true. We may still use other providers that don't offer it, but you want that, right? You don't? Well, then set our "very_require_params" to "very_true". And then switch a few toggles in the frontend. Oh and also add these 7 lines just so your other config options don't break. Oh wait they will break, how silly of us Is there any way to make it work as advertised? Of course no!
Sorry for the semi-offtopic rant. I still use them every day though, but not for open models anymore.
I wish there were a way to fire lobbyists. There is no feedback loop, they can be as bad as they want and never suffer a minute for taking away peoples rights.
It says US-Israel Bloc military deaths - 74. Iran military deaths - 10,500 It has no information what is the source of information. Seems like made up numbers.
OS and Cloud quality do not result in next fiscal quarter revenue gains, but AI "features" might due to hype. Reliability while important to users is less important to investors.
People arent robots, they are allowed their own thoughts and free will. Your comment implies any behavior against the interests of a corporation is somehow a sin. This is such a gross take.
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