I think OpenAI is screwed long-term, and their leadership knows it. Their most significant advantage was their employees, most of whom have now left for other companies. They're getting boxed in across every segment where they were previously the leader:
- Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube).
- Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too).
- Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding.
- Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?).
OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?
It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year.
I'd agree with all those facts about the competitive landscape, but in each of those competitors, there's enough wiggle room for me to think OpenAI isn't completely boxed in.
Google on multimodality: has been truly impressive over the last six months and has the deep advantages of Chrome, YouTube, and being the default web indexer, but it's entirely plausible they flub the landing on deep product integration.
Chinese companies and pricing: facts, and it's telling to me that OpenAI seems to have abandoned their rhetorical campaign from earlier this year teasing that "maybe we could charge $20000 a month" https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to....
Coding: Anthropic has been impressive but reliability and possible throttling of Claude has users (myself included) looking for alternatives.
Social: I think OpenAI has the biggest opportunity here, as OpenAI is closest to being a consumer oriented company of the model hyperscalers and they have a gigantic user base that they can take to whatever AI-based platform category replaces social. I'm somewhat skeptical that Meta at this point has their finger on the pulse of social users, and I think Superintelligence Labs isn't well designed to capitalize on Meta's advantages in segueing from social to whatever replaces social.
> an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.
private deals are becoming bigger than public deals recently. so perhaps the IPO market is not a larger source of capital. different untapped capital, maybe, but probably not larger.
Unfortunately I think you are wrong. Their most important asset is the leadership role of the company, the brand name and the muscle memory. Other employers may come and go - on a system level this doesn’t look important as longer as they can replace talanted folks with other talanted ones. This seems to be the case for nowhere
Have to agree if services likes Deepseek remain free or at least extremely cheap I don’t see a long term profitability outlook for OpenAI. Gemini has also greatly improved and with Googles infrastructure and ecosystem … again long term outlook doesn’t look promising for OpenAI.
LLMs are architected to aim toward the center of the bell curve of their training data. You shouldn't expect them to produce innovative ideas, but the upside is they also won't produce terrible ones.
The same applies to design. Most of the time, you get something that "doesn't suck", which is perfectly fine for projects where using a designer isn't worth it, like internal corporate pages. But consumer-facing pages require nuance to understand the client and their branding (which clients often struggle to articulate themselves), and that's not something current models can capture.
Internal corporate tooling can be greatly improved by promoting scheduled "water cooler chat on steroids" calls between engineers/designers/product/tpms/managers and the actual users.
What's nice is that these sessions bleed into everything. You don't need to look through users' eyes that many times to find great improvement in UX sensibilities.
Since scheduling is the biggest pain point here, I just built a scheduler and a signup form at work. Everyone who gets a session walks away with positive feedback, the company as a whole becomes more interconnected, and now I'm working to get more and more folk on board.
My goal is to unleash a whole flotilla of white collar workers who understand the value of talking to the users such that they too push for lightweight, no action item, scheduled sessions which becomes standard practice as part of our careers and we all end up with better software as a whole.
Tangent: Google keeps doing the same with GCP/Firebase/etc. Every year they launch a bunch of really well-crafted services that make it easy to build the most average kind of product in whatever area is trendy that year. Every year I am left intrigued but needing more to actually make use of them. The next year it's something else.
I guess this is primarily a business pattern. Or anti-pattern?
Assuming you mean cloud platforms in general, I don't even think it's that tangential. In fact it may cut to the heart of the matter: if React-over-REST-over-SQL-plus-some-background-jobs was all we needed, cloud platform innovation would've stopped at Heroku and Rails 20 years ago, and AI could probably make a run on replacing SWE jobs entirely.
But as it's played out, there are a ton of use cases that don't fit neatly into that model, and each year the cloud platforms offer new tools that fit some of those use cases. AI will probably be able to string together existing tools as IaaS providers offer them, perhaps without even involving an engineer, but for use cases that are still outside cloud platform offerings, seem like things that require some ingenuity and creativity that AI wouldn't be able to grok.
Yeah, my experience is that when they do work they'll get the job done but the design is going to be unmaintainable garbage unless I force my own design on it.
I think it can be a false comfort to think of LLMs being trained to the center of the bell curve. I think it's closer to true that there's no real "average" (just like there isn't an "average" human) because there's just too many dimensions.
But what LLMs do, in the absence of better instructions, is expect that the user WANTS the most middling innocuous output. Which is very reasonable! It's not a lack of capability; it's a strong capability to fill in the gaps in its instructions.
The person who has a good intuition for design (visual, narrative, conversational) but can't articulate that as instructions will find themselves stuck. And unsurprisingly this is common, because having that vision and being able to communicate that vision to an LLM is not a well practiced skill. Instructing an LLM is a little like instructing a person... but only a little. You have to learn it. And I don't think as LLMs get better that this will magically fix itself, because it's not exactly an error, there's no "right" answer.
Which is to say: I think applying design to one's work with AI is possible, important, and seldom done.
I've had great success using Claude to produce a new landing page which is much more stylish than something I would produce myself. It's also nowhere near the standard expected from a professional designer, but for a FOSS app, that's just fine with me :)
From time to time I look at the explore page of various AI design tools, and they are as corporate-depressing as I didn't expect them to be [1]. It's not even a bell curve. It feels like they are overindexed on bland corporate aesthetic. Getting them to output anything but a Linear clone is an exercise in frustration.
I think the big issue with design is the ux to LLMs at the moment: it’s really hard to iterate on a design, see the output, make changes etc. I’ve had terrible luck getting good design from ChatGPT/Codex, but V0 is probably one of the most impressive AI UX experiences I’ve encountered — I often show it to non-technical friends who are ai skeptical.
LLMs don't produce ideas they implement them, anyone who is relying on LLM produced ideas basically doesn't matter the whole point is they make people who want to design interesting stuff have a lower barrier to entry of actually producing stuff.
I don't understand why people advocate so strongly for `--dangerously-skip-permissions`.
Setting up "permissions.allow" in `.claude/settings.local.json` takes minimal time. Claude even lets you configure this while approving code, and you can use wildcards like "Bash(timeout:*)". This is far safer than risking disasters like dropping a staging database or deleting all unstaged code, which Claude would do last week, if I were running it in the YOLO mode.
The worst part is seeing READMEs in popular GitHub repos telling people to run YOLO mode without explaining the tradeoffs. They just say, "Run with these parameters, and you're all good, bruh," without any warning about the risks.
I wish they could change the parameter to signify how scary it can be, just like React did with React.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED (https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/issues/3896)
>Edit: perhaps 12 angry men was good enough at the time.
I recently watched it for the first time, and it was one of the best movies I've seen. I can't believe how invested I was, even though the plot was so simple.
I think this is great. A problem with huge codebases is that CLAUDE.md files become bloated with niche workflows like CI and E2E testing. Combined with MCPs, this pollutes the context window and eventually degrades performance.
You get the best of both worlds if you can select tokens by problem rather than by folder.
The key question is how effective this will be with tool calling.
I'm not sure what you mean. This is the vanilla Substack layout.
EDIT: Removed the video because a bug in Substack causes the space bar to play the video instead of scrolling down. Sorry for the unintentional jumpscare.
The headline and article try to bias and frame the story to make people question: "Is OpenAI snitching on me?"
In reality, Uber records and conflicting statements incriminated him. He seems to be the one who provided the ChatGPT record to try to prove that the fire was unintentional.[1]
> He was visibly anxious during that interview, according to the complaint. His efforts to call 911 and his question to ChatGPT about a cigarette lighting a fire indicated that he wanted to create a more innocent explanation for the fire's start and to show he tried to assist with suppression, the complaint said.
It looks like the headline may have changed as well since the HN submission, assuming that the title here was the original headline. Now the headline seems to be "Suspect in Palisades fire allegedly used ChatGPT to generate images of burning forests and cities".
Changing the headline post hoc without any indication of the change is kind of a pet peeve of mine. Why is it not indicated as errata in the article like other edits when the body of the text is changed or factual information is confirmed?
Headlines are marketing and layout design, not journalism. Journalists have no role in title generation. And changes could be due to AB testing. Seems relatively immaterial to me.
I call BS on that given how many people ONLY read the headline. It is (well, should be) the responsibility of the journalism industry, of which the editors are still a part of, to accurately convey information, and that includes in the part of most heavily shared and read.
(and yah, yada yada about journalism no longer, or maybe never, being about truth, I get it, but still IMO the field should be held to the higher journalistic standard)
Also why the sudden interest? Amazon Alexa snips have been used before in court/investigation and this is not new. But makes me wonder about what happens when you are dealing with summaries of summaries of long gone tokens. Is that evidence?
I suppose it's a good reminder to people that every cloud service they interact with is collecting data which can be used against them in court or in any number of other ways at any point in the future and that chatbots are no exception.
I'm sure that there are many people who thoughtlessly type very personal things into chatgpt including things that might not look so good for them if they came out at trial.
It is very different. In one case you actively have to prod a "neutral" machine to get your dark curiosity satiated, in the other case the machine is designed to draw it out of you.
Same difference as: "Allowing minors into casinos... is it any different from letting them play cards with their friends at home with their pocket money?"
> in the other case the machine is designed to draw it out of you.
I take issue with the "is designed to" phrase. That implies an intentionality upon OpenAI (and others) to create something that acts as a therapist or confidant. It is designed to respond to you in a way that you ask it to. The agency for confiding deep secrets to a cloud service is entirely upon the human typing in the text.
If one doesn't try to make it your friend, it doesn't try to act like it.
> The New York Times is demanding that we retain even deleted ChatGPT chats and API content that would typically be automatically removed from our systems within 30 days.
> ...
> This data is not automatically shared with The New York Times or anyone else. It’s locked under a separate legal hold, meaning it’s securely stored and can only be accessed under strict legal protocols.
> ...
> Right now, the court order forces us to retain consumer ChatGPT and API content going forward. That said, we are actively challenging the order, and if we are successful, we’ll resume our standard data retention practices.
I think they were referring to intermediate tokens in "Thinking" models, which are summarized in the interface but ultimately discarded (and may themselves be summaries of sources, other chats, or earlier intermediate states).
Presumably what's of evidentiary value is the tokens you type, though.
Hmm. The Rolling Stone article (and linked press conference) has the police giving a vastly different account of the ChatGPT logs they're complaining about:
> Investigators, he noted, allege that some months prior to the burning of the Pacific Palisades, Rinderknecht had prompted ChatGPT to generate “a dystopian painting showing, in part, a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it.” A screen at the press conference showed several iterations on such a concept...
(Although, to be clear, it's not like the logs are the only evidence against him; it doesn't even look like parallel construction. So if one assumes "as evidence" usually implies "as sole evidence," I can see how the headline could be seen as sensationalizing/misleading.)
> A large number of California wildfires have been set by arsonists and arson is a key tactic used by ecoterrorist groups like ELF
This is misleading. Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
If you're engaged in a fight against logging, burning down forests is likely not the first thing on your mind.
Immediately jumping to conclusions and then using that conclusion as a political weapon is part of the insanity. Everything that happens has to be qualified as either beneficial to your political position or detrimental to it, dictating how you respond to it. Everything has to be framed as the fault of your "evil" opponents or as a lie and fake news.
This is extremely detrimental to societal cohesion and to democratic political processes, and I wish people would stop before it's too late.
> Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
False. If you know anything about forests you know that before “European colonizers” (not my preferred terminology tbh) wildfire was very common and a tool wielded by indigenous peoples to control overgrowth of the sort that is now common given “intrusion” of housing into forested land which is often a subject of the ecoterrorist’s disdain.
When a major serial arsonist is caught and he explains, “f** you f*** pigs!” a natural response is to pattern match to anarchist or ecoterrorist fringe groups and anti-authoritarian personality types. When the news censors or conspicuously avoids discussion of specific individuals and their motives, preferring an imo more beneficial focus on climate change (a very real and pressing threat) even more pattern matching occurs.
I’m not saying such speculation is useful or accurate, but I don’t think it’s insanity by any stretch.
Fair enough but given sparse coverage of the backgrounds of many serial arsonists (the ones that got caught, presumably most of them do not) behind recent California wildfires, people notice that for example, Alexandra Souverneva, was an Environmental Studies major and yoga instructor and speculate on her motive.
Much of that speculation is the direct result of the conspicuously sparse reporting about the backgrounds of these arsonists. There was Maynard, the college professor, there was Eric Michael Smith who may have simply been anti-authoritarian bedwetter type. I mean, it’s a huge list but the coverage, perhaps for noble reasons, focuses almost exclusively on climate change which if you understand the science and notice the vast number of arsonists that do get caught seems almost conspiratorial to those prone to conjecture.
this is an incredible leap in imagination. I'm constantly impressed by that kind of diversity in thought towards a common goal.
normally it's the other way round - diverse thought leads to many places, but in hating the big bad leftie boogeyman, certain people seem really great at joining the dots.
here's a hint: it's actually written in the stars! don't believe me? take a map of a deep sky survey, and draw dots! you'll find the message you're looking for.
The only indisputable fact about the Kirk assassin was that he had access to a bad ass rifle and knew how to use it. Like many shooters, he was a gun nut with psychological issues.
You claiming that he was "a leftist" is exactly the tribalism you complain about.
As much as i hate it this does prove the other commenters point. They guy was at the very least indisputably not right wing. Leftist? Maybe not too political of a take for me but he was no maganut at the time of the act.
The dude was dating a trans person. The level of cognitive dissonance on display is a wonder to behold. One of the memes was a ref to furry culture another 4chan. Like i said, lefty? Idk, i dont like grouping everyone like that. But maga? Not even.
You're going to have to post some evidence bud. I can't find anyone denying the engravings existed.
Nick Fuentes himself pleaded with his followers not to commit any more violence immediately after Kirk was assassinated: "I pray to God that nobody else is hurt as a result of this. I hope that it stops here. It should stop here. To all of my followers: if you take up arms, I disavow you."
> While speaking on his show Rumble, Fuentes, told his followers, known as “groypers,” that if they turn to violence in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk, he will “disavow” and “disown" them.
Hes saying that they shouldn't "turn to violence in the wake of the killing". Where does that imply that it was one of his followers? Its clearly saying "dont take revenge".
The BBC article:
> At the same time, a number of left-wing social media users have continued to claim that Robinson is a Trump supporter or member of a fringe, far-right group known as "groypers"
They explicitly provide no evidence that the shooter was far right, only mentioning that left-wing social media claims that he is far right -- the very source of the disinformation!
You are falling for straight disinformation, and its not particularly subtle. Its tribalism.
PS: lets be clear, it was disinformation not misinformation - the intent was to lie and deceive.
Sure, if you want to ignore the half of the equation of tribalism that you’re exhibiting. Labeling things as NOT one side is ALSO tribalism… like repeatedly trying to point out someone is a “leftist” because they share some ideologies with the left. You are just as much the problem you are attempting to point the finger with.
Not at all. The context of the thread was the twitter page where tons of people/bots were inaccurately labeling the guy as MAGA. Correcting that is not tribalism because it is truthful. That you see it as tribalism is projection.
You are literally doing what you're describing, man! Do you not see that you are also engulfed in tribalism?!
You grasp on to any little shred of factoid (who cares if true or not) to put anyone you don't like as "the other tribe".. "Oh he donated $1 to Biden! Fucking leftist!". "Oh a report says his mom said he's a leftist?! I fucking knew it!".
It's sad. It's even sadder if you can't see it in yourself.
These questions are almost always more complex and nuanced than simply left or right. I agree with you on the second part to a degree—insomuch as the modern media landscape pushes people to quickly label shooters and tends to disincentivize any sort of nuance—but might you be doing the same here?
The charging document[0] said that his mother claimed "that over the last year or so, Robinson had become more political and had started to lean more to the left – becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented." There's also a text message he sent, which said "since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga." That's it. Acquaintances said "he wasn't too fond of Trump or Charlie [Kirk]," but we still haven't seen much that explains the specifics of why beyond the gay and trans rights angle. A former high school classmate said "[w]hen I knew him and his family, they were like diehard Trump" and that he was politically conservative and supported Trump "ahead of the 2020 election."[1]
As for what changed and why, we don't know. Did he stop supporting Trump because of gay and trans rights? Did he still believe in other conservative ideas? Simply labeling him as a leftist implies a cohesive ideology, but ideology is rarely so simple or straightforward even for normal people who don't decide to commit political assassinations.
Beyond that, a lot of even ideologically-motivated shooters have some awfully peculiar and non-cohesive ideologies. If the suspect agrees with 80% of a particular tribe's most common views, but that last 20% consists of some truly batshit ideas that have very little if any support, are they still a member of that tribe? Would that tribe even want them? Would they themselves want to be part of that tribe? Plenty of conservatives who believed fully in the movement's ideas broke with Trump in 2016 solely on the basis of his personal character.
They can also grab onto ideas from other tribes, to the point where investigators wind up crawling through something that's less a cohesive political ideology and more a smorgasbord of ideas they pinned together. I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
> I mean, hell, you've got to have a screw or two loose to think a political assassination is going to somehow lessen--let alone stop--anti-gay and/or anti-trans sentiment. Run that idea past pretty much any left-leaning politician, activist, or political junkie, and they'll tell you you're a moron, likely right before giving the FBI a call.
Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
> If you dont believe even his mother, theres tons of other evidence. The anti fascism messaging on his bullets. The text messages to his partner saying a Kirk was full of hate.
Sigh. That's not what I claimed. I can accept his mother's limited statement from the charging document at face value, and still point out that we still know very little about his ideological leanings. Why did she consider him moving left? Was it just because of gay rights? Did his other views shift as well? Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I have no clue, but I want answers to these questions if only because they can contribute to the effort of better understanding radicalization pathways and the process by which some random kid decided to commit an act of political violence.
We know that shooters rarely have cohesive, logical ideologies. The fact that a shooter decides to become a shooter in the first place is evidence that their personal ideology has shifted in some truly extreme ways that puts them--or should put them--outside the normal political discourse. Put another way, radicalization can take people to some truly unexpected places and it's entirely reasonable to want a nuanced view before jumping to affix labels because while labels can help us understand some things, they can also obscure other aspects and create entirely separate problems. Especially when those labels then get for partisan purposes and to undermine the political discourse.
As for the casings? We've got memes and video game references.[0] The most overtly political parts are "hey fascist, CATCH" with a video game code thrown in for good measure and an 19th century folksong that later became an anti-Mussolini resistance anthem. The others are memes. Do they all have meaning for the shooter? Obviously, since he went through the effort to engrave the casings. At the same time, their immaturity and oddness should be pointed out as well, as they undermine the idea that this was some sort of rational consequence of a cohesive political ideology.
> Straight cope and Im pretty sure I dont need to say why.
Perhaps you should re-read the sentence before trying to read something into it that wasn't present? My point was simple: even setting aside the ethical aspects of the question (simple answer: outside of baby Hitler hypotheticals, it's bad--and even with Baby Hitler, most people will acknowledge they're trying to leverage his future actions to make literal baby murder pencil out because they recognize that baby murder is a prima facie immoral act), political assassination is an insanely stupid means to shift public opinion and pretty much any politician, activist, or advisor--whether on the right or left--will tell you the same thing. Feel free to substitute right-leaning for left-leaning in my original comment if "left-leaning" made the sentence read as something I hadn't intended. I certainly didn't intend to suggest that somehow only left-leaning folks are capable of recognizing that political assassination is a very bad idea with tons of unintended consequences. Anyone with even a basic grasp on history is more than capable of knowing how dumb it is.
Hell, we've got literal case studies showing how political assassinations tend to blow up in everyone's face. The CIA has a list of coups and political assassinations that pretty much all resulted in serious blowback that undermined their intended outcomes--and often resulted in the very thing they wanted to prevent.
So, yeah, I think that if the shooter shopped the idea that murdering Charlie Kirk would somehow magically make things better for gay or trans people to gay and trans advocacy groups--or influential figures on the left more broadly--they'd almost unanimously tell him he's a moron and notify the FBI even if they thought Kirk was a pox on American political discourse. It's an insane proposition, and only in the mind of someone who has serious problems would it somehow make sense.
I also think that the reverse situation--where the shooter wanted to benefit some conservative constituency or ideology by murdering a liberal political activist and shopped the idea around conservative politicians and activists--would likely result in the same call to the FBI.
> Was the shooter's motivation more about the political side of things, or some misplaced idea that they were somehow protecting or helping their partner?
I respect the effort you are putting in, but you are answering a question that was not part of this thread: what was his motivation.
The question in this thread was somewhat simpler: was he on the left?
Because the context of this discussion was the twitter thread where people and bots were en masse assigning MAGA affiliation to killers, just like they did in the Charlie Kirk situation.
And the answer is unequivocal: Robinson was not MAGA or groyper, he was on the left.
This may be unpopular opinion, but I'm more or less okay with things like search records and Uber receipts being included as evidence when there's probable cause.
It's no different than the contents of your home. Obviously we don't want police busting in to random homes to search, but if you're the suspect of a crime and police have a warrant, it's entirely reasonable to enter a home and search. I guess it can't necessarily help clear you up like an alibi would, but if the party is guilty is could provide things like more certainty, motivation, timeline of events, etc.
I think people conflate the two. They hold that certain things should remain private under all circumstances, where I believe the risk is a large dragnet of surveillance that affects everyone as opposed to targeted tools to determine guilt or innocence.
I don’t think you hold an unreasonable position on that issue. If everything is operating as it should then many would agree.
We’ve long ago entered a reality where almost everyone has a device on them that can track their exact location all the time and keeps a log of all their connections, interests and experiences. If a crime occurs at a location police can now theoretically see everyone who was in the vicinity, or who researched methods of committing a crime, etc. It’s hard to balance personal freedoms with justice, especially when those who execute on that balance have a monopoly on violence and can at times operate without public review. I think it’s the power differential that makes the debate and advocacy for clearer privacy protection more practical.
I shouldn't have to remind everyone that cops already can skip getting a warrant for things like phone location data.
Plenty of big services will just give cops info if they ask for it. It's legal. Any company or individual can just offer up evidence against you and that's fine, but big companies will have policies that do not require warrants.
Despite this atrocious anti-privacy stance, cops STILL clear around half of violent crimes, and that's only in states with rather good police forces, usually involving higher requirements than "A pulse" and long training in a police Academy. Other states get as low as 10% of crimes actually solved.
When you've built a panopticon and cops STILL can't solve cases, it's time to stop giving up rights and fix the cops.
> Plenty of big services will just give cops info if they ask for it. It's legal. Any company or individual can just offer up evidence against you and that's fine, but big companies will have policies that do not require warrants.
I think this is where policy is failing. No clear protections on privacy and collusion between corporations and the state is allowed. It’s outdated and impractical to have the limits on search and seizure at physical boundaries but not electronic ones.
And in a way, I see some mapping of this to the recent FCC vs Jimmy Kimmel situation. Sure, Kimmel's case was more overt, because the FCC guy was very obviously threatening a private company so that the company would do that the government wanted, and in this case, it's more like companies are "sponteneously" coming up to help, but I still think that such spontaneity can be suspicious, specially if we are talking about companies with large contracts with the government, or interest in influencing policy.
In other words: if it's Joe Schmoe's Haberdashery forwarding CCTV footage to police to elucidate a crime right in front of their door, sure, it's fine and dandy, they do have an interest in not having crime in front of their door. But when Revolving Door MegaCorp builds a dragnet of surveillance AND is also selling cloud contracts to the government by the billion, it becomes a lot more murky if they just start snitching on everything they see.
As a naturally curious person, who reads a lot and looks up a lot of things, I've learned to be cautious when talking to regular people.
While considering buying a house I did extensive research about fires. To do my job, I often read about computer security, data exfiltration, hackers and ransomware.
If I watch a WWI documentary, I'll end up reading about mustard gas and trench foot and how to aim artillery afterwards. If I read a sci-fi novel about a lab leak virus, I'll end up researching how real virus safety works and about bioterrorism. If I listen to a podcast about psychedelic-assisted therapy, I'll end up researching how drugs work and how they were discovered.
If I'm ever accused of a crime, of almost any variety or circumstance, I'm sure that prosecutors would be able to find suspicious searches related to it in my history. And then leaked out to the press or mentioned to the jury as just a vague "suspect had searches related to..."
The average juror, or the average person who's just scrolling past a headline, could pretty trivially be convinced that my search history is nefarious for almost any accusation.
Sometimes you are better off not invoking your right to a jury trial because if there is straight up evidence in your favor, it's easier to get a jury to ignore that for emotional bullshit than a judge.
DAs for bigger departments are likely well equipped, well trained, and well practiced at tugging on the heartstrings of average juries, which are not average people, because jury selection is often a bad system.
Sure, warrants and subpoenas need to exist in order for the legal system to function. However, they have limits.
The modern abuse of the third-party doctrine is a different topic. Modern usage of the third-party doctrine claims (for instance) that emails sent and received via Gmail are actually Google's property and thus they can serve Google a warrant in order to access anyone's emails. The old-timey equivalent would be that the police could subpoena the post office to get the contents of my (past) letters -- this is something that would've been considered inconceivably illegal a few decades ago, but because of technical details of the design of the internet, we have ended up in this situation. Of course, the fact there are these choke points you can subpoena is very useful to the mass surveillance crowd (which is why these topics get linked -- people forget that many of these mass surveillance programs do have rubber-stamped court orders to claim that there is some legal basis for wiretapping hundreds of millions of people without probable cause).
In addition (in the US) the 5th amendment allows you the right to not be witness against yourself, and this has been found to apply to certain kinds of requests for documents. However, because of the third-party doctrine you cannot exercise those rights because you are not being asked to produce those documents.
The first shows up in court cases about things like "which phones were near the crime" or "who in the area was talking about forest fires to ChatGPT?" If you sweep the net far enough, everyone can be put under suspicion for something.
A fun example of the second from a few years ago in the New York area was toll records being accessed to prove affairs. While most of us are OK with detectives investigating murders getting access to private information, having to turn it over to our exes is more questionable. (And the more personal the information, the less we are OK with it.)
I think you're right, but the two collide over the question of whether police have the right to be able to access your stuff, or merely the right to try to access it.
In the past, if you put evidence in a safe and refused to open it, the police could crack it, drill it, cut it open, etc. if all else failed.
Modern technology allows wide access to the equivalent of a perfectly impregnable safe. If the police get a warrant for your files, but your files fundamentally cannot be read without your cooperation, what then?
It comes down to three options: accept this possibility and do without the evidence; make it legally required to unlock the files, with a punishment at least as severe as you're facing for the actual crime; or outlaw impregnable safes.
There doesn't seem to be any consensus yet about which approach is correct. We see all three in action in various places.
>In reality, Uber records and conflicting statements incriminated him. He seems to be the one who provided the ChatGPT record to try to prove that the fire was unintentional.[1]
Do you think OpenAI wont produce responsive records when it receives a lawful subpoena?
It's better to keep a level head about such things. It's quite obvious that the NSA does not have the facilities to simply intercept and store everything.
Yes -- even Mullvad -- which is precisely why they do not collect the data. Because if they did have the data, they would have to give it over, or they could go to prison.
Typically, courts will summon a specific person to comply with their request, often a corporate officer or director with a role or authority relevant to what is being requested. If they don't comply with their request, they can be held in contempt.
The specifics vary by country, but basically all legal systems require you to comply with what they say and impose penalties if you don't. I don't know if there are any countries where it's legal to ignore the courts, but I would imagine that their court systems don't work too well.
Courts, in the US at least, can hold an officer of a corporation personally responsible for violating a subpoena order, if they were in a position to comply with it and chose not to. It's not technically a piercing of the corporate veil (because they are being personally ordered to comply), but it's effectively the same thing.
It is, with this crowd, where data is currency. I literally have solitaire games, trying to get me to create server accounts, so that the authors can extract PiD from me.
Tech is full of people that make extremely good money, from other people's personal information, and they plug their ears and sing "La-la-laaaa-I-can't-hear-yooouuu-la-la-la", when confronted with information that says what they are doing has problems. Not just techhies. That's fairly basic human nature.
This is pretty much the embodiment of Upton Sinclair's quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
For my part, I don't collect any data that I don't need; even if it makes it more difficult to do stuff like administer a server.
It's only a problem if you don't want to be legally obligated to produce it. Either way, probably paying lawyer time for a response. Not that I disagree with you at all.
It's also a problem if you actually care about your users, and don't want to expose their data, in ways that could -literally- end up putting their lives in danger.
> And then 3 or 4 allies of the US passed laws enabling the government to require companies to develop tools or face prison time
My understanding is that Apple’s executives were surprised at the forcefulness of the opposition to their stand together with the meekness of public support.
(Having worked on private legislation, I get it. You work on privacy and like two people call their electeds because most people don’t care about privacy, while those who do are predominantly civically nihilists or lazy.)
I'm sure the OP means well, but I think this approach is misguided. It comes across as self-centered rather than supportive. You might get a polite "thanks" in response, but I doubt it will be genuinely appreciated.
If you care about the person and want to talk with them, reach out and be genuine. If not, don't bother them with LLM corporate-speak masquerading as support. Let's be honest: they didn't "part ways" with the company--they were fired.
Right now, they're worried about paying their bills, not about making their former coworkers feel better.
If you really want to help, reach out to your network and see if anyone is hiring. I've successfully connected many laid-off former coworkers with new opportunities. I've even approached recruiters that I ignored saying, "I'm not available, but this person is looking, and they're excellent."
OP's blog post also rang false to me. It feels like it was written by someone who works in HR trying to promote a culture that inhibits real interactions, under the guise of being "a good human being."
Being a good human involves honesty and naming things that are extremely difficult to name when you're both employed at the same place. I've had so many honest and illuminating conversations with coworkers after one or both of us left a company or organization, conversations that deepened into real friendships instead of just being colleagues.
Absolutely keep in touch with people because connection is essential to the human existence. Don't "pretend" to offer connection if you aren't willing to nourish it. The pretense is just mean and does more harm than good.
Yeah. There's a sort of uncanny valley to this that's hard to explain but you know when you see it.
It's like, conversations naturally taper yes, sensitive topics are danced around yes, particularly with people you're not that close with, but there's a grey area people play with generously in genuine interactions, precisely because they actually care.
Conversely in some interactions where you're sort of made acutely aware you've gone 'off script' the moment it happens and you realise, oh, this was always just templated/transactional.
I just think it's generally bad advice to enter into such interactions knowingly, even if you have good intentions, because of this. It's quite likely to happen and it's just an overall negative experience.
It's kinda hard to write an example or template for a communication pattern that seems really personal and genuine. OP is describing a pattern and is explicit that it's both a) a good thing to do on an emotional and ethical level and b) that the industry is small and it's good to not burn bridges.
I think it's clear from context that you can make the actual message a lot more personal based on your relationship with that person, but it seems harsh to say 'this looks like an HR template' when the post is kinda explicitly trying to make a general point.
>Don’t trash your employer, nor respond if they do. If they start that, say “I’m sorry, I can imagine why you’d feel that way, but I can’t continue this conversation.”. Note I’ve never had someone do this.
Are you kidding? Treat someone like a human but the moment they express emotion, explicitly denounce the thread and hang up?
Yeah, not sure what the author was thinking there. Definitely not 'reaffirming of both your and their humanity'.
I mean, I get that it's supposed to be just a general pointer or something, but that phrase is word for word what an LLM would say when it's self censoring... Or something lifted out of an episode of Severance.
- “Hi <firstname>, sorry to hear what <company> did to you; that was a real dick move! I appreciated your efforts and wish you the best!”
- Offer to help, and follow-up.
- Only trash the employer if they deserve it, and have a conversation about why they're trash if the person is interested. If they start that, say “Yea, those guys are cunts. Especially your boss Ed. He's incompetent, and has been blocking you and the team ever since he got promoted. They should have promoted you or Stacie instead.”.
- Carry on the conversation if they're interested. A lot of colleagues don't stay in touch when people get fired. Stay in touch! You'll both be better off for it. Making friends is hard, and losing them is easy.
- Say things like “wish we could have kept you” or “you were such a great performer. I know why you were laid off, and was a dumb move on the company's part. I'm interviewing at other places now, and will leave as soon as I find a replacement; this is a sinking ship. Let me know once you find something - I'm interested too!”
To add to this, remember that YOUR CAREER can and will transcend layoffs, bad bosses, bad companies, etc. With few exceptions, the network you build with the good people you work with are a thousand times more valuable than your current role or predicament.
I've seen people get laid off or fired that, while not necessarily wishing 9/10 of them ill will, am satisfied/happy to varying levels that they are gone. These are people that are a combination of lazy, unintelligent, entitled, uncooperative, etc.
There have been people (~5 in my 25 year career) where I danced on their figurative grave.
There are some (mostly early in my career) where I as shocked, kept in some brief contact with them, but came to the conclusion that the company was right in their move.
There are some where I was immediately in contact with them, planning beers or whatever.
Then there are those that I have kept in touch with over my whole career and have essentially become close friends. We have our own private group chats, keep up to date on tech, people, opportunities, etc. PEOPLE LIKE THIS ARE WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD.
Companies are not people. They don't have feelings and they will terminate people, often indiscriminately, over short term and trivial things like a single bad quarter or because some VP needs to flex their MBA. They can act stupid and if other people point it out and don't get a response, that either means you look stupid for not being able to see it, or worse you look like a hack that's never worth being reached out to again. That also ignores the fact that when people are hurt or in shock, they lash out a bit. Terminating the conversation just means you don't care or can't handle any emotion...
The smart people you've worked with at bad companies are often the best to keep in touch with, and you won't know it unless you're willing to open up about "saying bad things" about the company - or the people above both of you.
This statement "...but I doubt it will be genuinely appreciated" implies not. Otherwise I'd expect you to have written "but when I was let go, I would not have genuinely appreciated this type of response".
I have been let go. I truly didn't understand what it was like until I went through it. It was crushing. Really crushing.
That experience doesn't make me a world-class expert, I get it. But I would have loved any acknowledgement of my humanity or appreciation of the worth I provided to my employer from co-workers on that day (or even a few days later).
I also want to acknowledge that people who are former colleagues have a variety of energy they can offer to those who are laid off. The folks who remain have more work on their plate, may wonder about the future of the company, and are generally frustrated or frightened too. I think people who remain should offer whatever consolation they have the ability to, based on their relationship with the folks who are let go.
For some, that might be (as mentioned in other comments) offering up their network and helping someone actively. For others, simply saying goodbye might be all they have energy and space for. I wanted to keep the advice as simple as possible so that folks don't have the excuse of saying to themselves "it's too much work, I have so much going on" and doing nothing, which is, in my experience, worse for the folks who are laid off.
Appreciate the feedback about the coldness and tone. Lots of good suggestions in the comments about how to phrase my advice better.
I had a few other comments below addressing things you brought up that I'll link so I don't repeat myself:
>If not, don't bother them with LLM corporate-speak masquerading as support. Let's be honest: they didn't "part ways" with the company--they were fired.
I can think of few more grotesquely slimy developments in the last century or so of human communications than the blandly saccharine corporate-speak that now prevails in government and business like an ever-spreading parasitic infection. It permeates nearly everything and is used as a shield by shitbag executives and grossly corrupt organizations to disguise their true nature and the many examples of mendacity that their activities really involve.
Now we also see it being applied by the actual people, real people, communicating informally with real other people inside these same organizations, even when they apparently mean well in their own brainwashed, dimwitted way.
If I ever had anyone write a goodbye message to me in which they described me getting my ass fired as "parting ways", i'd plainly tell them to shove such nonsense wording up their ass if they really give a shit about me, or about being human.
- Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube).
- Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too).
- Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding.
- Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?).
OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?
It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year.
If they want to cash out, now is the time.