I actually view this as a reasonable response. I don't know anything about giraffes so to me it's entirely plausible that they get their spots later in life.
Can someone explain how it's ethical to be working on multiple things like this at the same time (e.g. OpenAI, AI chips, that eye orb crypto thing), but the benefits of each not accruing to the other investors, only to that individual?
I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it.
> I've always had similar questions about folks like Musk and Dorsey. Is it simply lack of proper governance? Is it something written into their contacts? Is this just a Silicon Valley thing? I can only imagine that a lot of people would like to work on many side projects, but their employment agreements forbid it.
Folks like Musk and Dorsey have a lot more leverage when they're negotiating their contracts but when it comes to public companies, they get sued all the time over their decisions. The lawsuits are just very drawn out, boring affairs that normally get settled during discovery, before any details actually become public so we don't often hear much about them from the media.
Musk was sued by tons of people over self dealing when Tesla bought SolarCity, for example.
It’s “ethical” in that it’s broadly accepted, and it’s accepted because those CEO’s are usually talented dealmakers that deliver huge opportunities to the companies they lead. It’s not new or unique to Silicon Valley. You can see these personalities pop up in commercial and political dealmaking throughout pretty much all of history.
You can get away with a lot when you’re effective.
Can you explain why it would be unethical, if the contracts with those investors do not explicitly state there will be exclusivity?
Investors buy shares (or similar), and maybe some other rights or benefits with money. They do this with a contract, like any other business deal. There is nothing unethical that I can see about any action vis-a-vis the investors as long as the contracts are honoured (and the action is not otherwise unethical).
Directors and board members do have certain (e.g. fiduciary) duties which my require conflicts of interest to be disclosed and approved, but in the case of Musk and (it seems) at least this particular Sam, investors and others to whom they have this duties can be quite willing to make such approvals.
P.S. for what it's worth, not all companies forbid other work or side projects (I know this because we don't, unless you're planning on simultaneously working for a direct competitor).
To me, the situation is not necessarily about ethics, although ethics are important to me. It's about conflicts of interest. You cannot maintain no conflicts of interest if you stand to personally gain in one venture from another venture and by pitting them against another or propping one up on the other.
If I'm a government official, then it's a conflict of interest if I own a construction company and increase budget for specific constructions to give my company a boost. This obviously happens in our government today, but it doesn't not make it a major problem.
The other perspective is one of grifting. It's similar to con men, who just move from thing to thing gathering up chips at the table. These investors and so-called entrepreneurs are just like that. They are interested in upping their profile at all costs. Their investments and companies are just a means.
I have worked in jobs where I need to report stock holdings more than a certain amount. Imagine a scenario where a low-level worker could affect billion dollar companies' stock enough to benefit from by buying their products on the job. Such a scenario doesn't exist, but the conflicts of interest are still tracked. It is much easier for high profile executives to affect price movements, amd that's why it's more, not less, important for high-level employees.
I agree with that. Government officials and politicians should have effectively no conflicts of interest because they have no real way to seek valid approval from the electorate for them.
For companies, if you have investors, employees, and (implicitly, because they continue to do business with you) customers all supportive of someone remaining in their position in spite of real or potential conflicts of interest then I think it's reasonable to say those are acceptable — and certainly not unethical — conflicts of interest.
The board deserves and has the right to a say, of course, but the extent to which it can justify a position that goes against those other groups is at best debatable even if they are not wholly comfortable with said conflicts. After all, the board should serve the company (customers, employees, shareholders/investors) and not itself. This [1] timeline of OpenAI board changes also seems to suggest some level of opportunism, and the possibility that at other times, or had departing members been replaced, it may not have been possible to get board consensus for firing Sam, either.
Amazon is currently facing a lawsuit for pretty much this exact scenario. Investors are suing because they selected Blue Origin for Kuiper. They also selected ULA and Arianespace for some of the launches, but apparently did not even consider SpaceX. Although note that Bezos is not CEO anymore. He was when Kuiper started development, but as far as I can tell, not when they selected launch providers.
I love this positive way of looking at it. I wish more people had this as the default - "I did a thing and it was bad/hard, here's my experience so you don't have to do the same."
I've lived in the Red Hat ecosystem for work recently. How does this compare to something like...
Fedora Silverblue?
Ansible?
Fedora Silverblue + Ansible?
Imagebuilder claims reproducibility, but as far as I know it mostly installed rpm packages as binaries, not from source, so it's not really proper reproducibility unless all the input packages are also reproducible.
If the descriptions of building packages from source, building distro images, and reproducibility in the linked thread didn't make sense to you, you're probably not really the target audience anyway.
Nix is a declarative OS, where you describe what the OS should look like, instead of Ansible where you give the OS steps to follow. Silverblue and Nix are orthogonal aside from being Linux distributions--Silverblue is attempting to change how software is delivered using only containers on an immutable host.
If you're interested in an Ansible alternative that uses Jsonnet and state tracking to somewhat mimic Nix, check out Etcha: https://etcha.dev
Ansible makes mutable changes to the OS, task by task.
Nix is immutable. A new change is made entirely new, and only after the build is successful, all packages are "symlinked" to the current system.
Fedora Silverblue is based on ostree [1]. It works similarly like git, but on your root tree. But it requires you to reboot the whole system for the changes to take effect. Since Nix is just symlinked packages, you don't need to reboot the system.
This is a great explanation of the technical differences between the available options. What are the practical differences - is one option better from a maintenance and usability standpoint for creating systems that are reproducible?
Alright, I'll bite... What led you to leaving the Linux world entirely? What can "the community" learn from your experience to make it better for others?
Linux is a great fantastic experience, and I have no qualms or ill will about it. I simply had no use for it anymore, and I needed to simplify. I've said before, I'm not a sysadmin anymore, I don't tinker with systems, I need stuff to be operational and in production.
I still love Linux and I'd use it for any given server or Raspi if that were part of my job. I do use it daily in my job, but to a very minimal extent.
Let's put aside the technology not working for a second...
Isn't it ultimately leadership's responsibility to prevent these situations from occurring in the first place? Shouldn't they have been testing/auditing this system beforehand, addressing risks, and ensuring there were adequate operational plans ready in the event of an issue?
It's easy to blame software (even easier when that software clearly doesn't work), but blame ultimately should be on the people making the decisions along the way that led to this outcome.
I've never heard of a School Board which had even a "graduated high school" requirement to be a Member. Let alone any "experience in public schools, or running an organization" one.
And even before America's Culture Wars got mixed in, "School Board Member" was generally a crappy job - meager pay, indifferent social status, huge complexity, and the Board is where the buck stops for every student discipline case, delusionally-demanding parent, ill-paid teacher, incomprehensible regulation, and financial impossibility in the district. Add to that minimal thanks when they do get it right, minimal voter turn-out for their elections, and having to do all their work through the full-time school administration bureaucracy - which is almost always self-serving, usually a bit contemptuous of the Board, and almost never the "best and brightest".
School board should terminate so-called leadership, and themselves then resign.
Though this may have something to do with it, staffing blue collar drivers is being handled nation-wide, "...likely caused by the significant changes to bus routing which were made necessary by the district’s severe driver shortage...".
You can run simulations perhaps, but it's not really possible to test this outside of production.
Running the routes on the real streets on a non-school day would show if your routes are completely non-feasible, but traffic patterns are different on school days. The first week of school is almost always worse than the rest of the weeks because there tends to be more bunching.
With a totally new transit plan, there's going to be a lot of bottlenecks that are hard to discover.
You could maybe run a test of the new routes during the school day toward the end of the previous school year, but you would need an extra fleet of busses and drivers, so that's a big expense. Not to mention, some school districts finalize their transit plans weeks before the start date when enrollment is firm.
So other than less battery performance, what other notable differences should I expect from Fedora on M2 vs the native MacOS. (I'm not being snarky, just trying to get a feel for how similar I should expect the performance and peripheral support to be; not focused on differences between gnome and the MacOS UI)
I think getting information about devices in and connected to the system would be easier from Linux; might be nice for device and board programming or diagnosing USB devices.
I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.
Niche hardware stuff is likely cheaper to manage on Linux. I had to buy SwitchResX to set a higher resolution for my monitor, but I can do it from kernel parameter (video=), xrandr, or EDID override all for free on Linux.
eGPUs acted notably differently from macOS vs Linux on the same laptop, and iirc it had to do with the Apple firmware doing something differently when booting non-macOS. I preferred it on Linux because it shut-off the iGPU completely but required full shutdowns to switch to internal; hot-swap worked fine from macOS even on unsupported TB2. Iirc there was also some EFI binary that could be booted first before Linux in order to trick the Apple firmware in keeping macOS-specific config, and I kept that on a flash drive to boot from the rare times when I wanted dual graphics. Windows was even more different in that the eGPU straight up didn't work.
> I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.
That'll be the GNU coreutils vs macOS's BSD userland. You'd likely have a similar frustration if you were to use FreeBSD. You can replace these with coreutils from Homebrew or MacPorts on the Mac. Also, the file system layout is different, again, much like the BSDs vs Linux/GNU. Even Linux distros vary slightly.
> It's literally impossible to block Europeans from getting access to these models, since bypassing geographic restrictions is trivial
I think that doesn’t matter because the strength of the lock is generally irrelevant legally.
Weak DRM is still a copyright violation to break in the US; and breaking a rusted 50-year-old lock on an item that doesn’t belong to you is still illegal.
I would hope that EU courts would recognize that anyone importing that software gets liability.
> It appears to be a baby
I actually view this as a reasonable response. I don't know anything about giraffes so to me it's entirely plausible that they get their spots later in life.