Zerodium and similar 0day sweatshops pays a lot for these 0days. Bug bounty programs directly thru the companies have been documented to screw over researchers.
Zero-day brokers pay in tranches for completed reliable exploits; bug bounties pay in lump sums for (generally) POCs. It's not an apples-apples comparison.
Well that's good, but they haven't even installed GFiber in cities they're in right now such as Omaha and Chicago etc. It's surprising how many places still don't have Fiber, and you can check your area with FCC's website: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home
Ok? The Google lawsuit and promising lawsuit of the Open library probably will result in a W for Meta. Torrenting is obviously the best way to grab lots of data to train on. Just because they seeded (torrent clients automatically do this) doesn't mean they actually uploaded anything if they couldn't connect to a peer or manually paused/stoped the torrent. Also the author slants the story against Meta and has a bias. At least I felt that way when reading it.
I'm not so sure. imo it would be a stretch to suggest Fair Use should disregard how the copyrighted materials were obtained.
For example, if Facebook employees broke into the home of a renowned author and stole private copyrighted materials they then used for training their LLMs, should the Court, in analyzing the Fair Use factors, disregard the illegal nature of how the copyrighted materials were obtained?
I believe it unlikely a Court would be willing to reward such behavior.
Once that principle is resolved, the next step would be for the court to consider whether it would make any difference if Facebook employees did not engage in the direct theft, but acquired copies of the stolen materials from the thief with full knowledge they were stoken.
If the court believes both #1 and #2 would be unacceptable, their analysis would then proceed to consider if there were differences favoring Facebook if Facebook acquired millions of copyrighted materials via a notorious website widely accused of illegally posting unauthorized access to copyrighted materials.
I suspect this will likely be the central issue of the legal debate. And, I for one, do not think Facebook has a very strong legal argument. Going back to the first step of the anslysis, I would be shocked if SCOTUS would be willing to state that how the copyrighted materials were obtained is irrelevant to the Fair Use analysis.
uBlock Origin blocked any ads if there was any and I didn't have any issues (Ungoogled Chrome). I didn't pay for Twitch and TVV LOL Pro works fine for me.
Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.
Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.
That talent found great use in cellular base stations. Nokia has been making them for a long time, no real pivot involved, more like a split of a conglomerate into per-vertical businesses. Fun fact: Nokia started as a pulp mill, they made tires and rubber boots, and so on. Think Mitsubishi or such.
Alan Kay really liked him in 2016. https://youtu.be/fKcCwa_j8e0 I think Altman is very good at cultivating people. Mind you, it seems that Swartz got around by making dazzling impressions on people, too.
PG liked him, because Altman decided to go to great lengths to get PG to like him.
While Drew, Chesky and the Collison brothers were busy building billion dollar companies, Altman took the “shortcut” and made a concerted effort to cozy up to the most powerful man in the room — and it payed dividends. Altman did the same thing in the early OpenAI days by doing flaterring video series interviews with Elon Musk, Vinod Khosla and others [0]. Incidentally, The YC interview with Elon Musk was done the year Musk made a donation to OpenAI (2016),
I still remember PG’s essay where he gave Altman the ultimate character reference (2008) [1]:
>When we predict good outcomes for startups, the qualities that come up in the supporting arguments are toughness, adaptability, determination. Which means to the extent we're correct, those are the qualities you need to win…Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them.
(In retrospect, praising Altman for being the “king of cannibals” has a nice touch of gallows humor to it. Hilariously, even recently pg has a seemingly unintentional tendency to give Altman compliments that appear to be character warnings masquerading as compliments.)
In 2009, pg included Altman in the top 5 in a list of the most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years.[2] If this was an observation made from afar, you could easily say it was “prescient”. But objectively at the time, no one could find any verifiable evidence in the real world to justify such an assessment. It wasn’t prescient because pg had became directly responsibly for Altman’s future success, in a case of self-fulfilling prophesy. Altman was often referenced in the acknowledgments of pg’s essays for reading early drafts and is probably referenced more than any other founder in the essays. Altman’s entire streetcred came from pg and also, once he made Altman head of YC, YC. From afar, it looks like a victory for office poltics, a skill incidentally that sociopaths are known to excel at.
Wouldn't you agree though that from YC Head to being the driving force of OpenAI was largely due to his own merit.
In fact, he started spending less time at YC and more time at OpenAI. At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint. Instead, he went all-in on OpenAI, and the results are there for everyone to see.
Yes, definitely. But becoming the head of YC was also due to his own merit. His merit was persuading the right people. After all, the essay where pg is giving his highest praise is an essay about fundraising.
Will you not agree that him becoming "the driving force of OpenAI" involved some highly publicized back-to-back persuasion drama as well? First he got Ilya and gdb to side with him against Elon, then he got OpenAI employees to side with him against Ilya and the board (a board that accused him of deceiving them). PG reiterated after that drama that Altman's special talent was becoming powerful.
This observation does not necessarily mean someone is a bad CEO, since the job of the CEO is to do good by your investors or future investors. And it's possible to do that without any morals whatsoever. But I think the recent drama did more to drive the competition than some of his investors would have liked.
Edit:
>At that time, OpenAI had no clear path to becoming the unicorn it is today, and YC was definitely better from a career standpoint.
This is very incorrect in my view. The presence of Elon Musk as investor and figurehead and Ilya, Karpathy, and Wojciech as domain experts, not to mention investments from YC members themselves (and the PayPal mafia) made OpenAI a very attractive investment early on.
I suspect (and this is rank speculation from a great distance) that a lot of SV tech leadership (of different kinds) has perceptions that were formed by the era of the Napster saga and haven't been revised since. PG seems committed to the idea that brash young wheeler-dealers can cut corners to win big and nothing really bad will happen as a result; as of recently Brewster Kahle seemed to be convinced that the final triumph of free media was just one more big push away.
Yeah, if I were to describe it more generally, I would say they self-select for techno-optimists. As investors, YC often espouses judging startup’s potential by considering how successful the startup could be if everything goes right, and then working backwards from there to see if it could be possible. I’m not sure if pg has a historic reference that he has a commitment to, since he was a startup founder himself he just may be projecting his personality to the startup founders he’s assessing, but I do think he’s more concerned with “whether the startup has accomplished something impressive despite the odds” and less about how they accomplished it.
They filter for red flags that would indicate a potential for failure for the startup. So if a “lack of morals” has no bearing on a startup’s success, then they don’t bother creating a filter that eliminates that. Nerds often prefer building things instead of dealing with people and often take things at face value instead of suspecting intrigue, and that sometimes makes them susceptible to manipulation. PG has admitted that he himself is bad at noticing certain personality or character flaws and that’s why Jessica was the adult in the room. But Jessica was probably observing the founders to see if there was good co-founder dynamic and other aspects that would affect startup success rather than trying to decipher their moral character. After all, there is no hippocratic oath in the tech sector.
Re lack of morals: if I’m not mistaken YC explicitly asks for instances where the founders have succeeded to "break the rules of the system" or similar. So you could even argue if anything they prefer founders that tend to bend the rules of required.
On the other hand, pg seems to have strong moral views on certain political topics.
Does Loopt count as a success? The exit was slightly more than the total investment, I guess. What about Worldcoin?
He's at least not someone I naturally associate with business success pre-OpenAI (and the jury's still out on OpenAI considering their financial situation) but I suppose depending on how you evaluate it his success rate isn't 0%.
You can say OpenAI is a "success" given their achievements in AI but those aren't Sam's work, he should mostly be credited with their business/financial performance and right now OpenAI-the-business is mostly a machine that burns electricity and operates in the red.
My personal favorite is that he was part of authoring the RSS spec at age 14. But you're more than welcome to Google for other pieces of evidence yourself if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative.
Time-sorted xml of hyperlinks? That was obvious at those early blog and wiki times, and we didn't care much about it. Esp. adding XML parsing, where a simply text format would have been much better.
Not that I disagree that with the idea that he was brilliant but the RSS spec isn't what I would consider a complex piece of documentation. Even for a 14 year old.
Not the person you asked, but I (in 2004) was part of sysadmin team at the school. I helped developing tools for automating many tasks around teacher and student performance measurement and tracking.
I also wrote a piece of software that went super viral among sysadmins all over the city and I was getting "thank you" emails for years after.
Had anyone been developing RSS spec next to me I'd definitely jump on it. As any 14 y/o would.
I don't think I'm particularly brilliant or even smart. Your circle defines you.
Surround any healthy teenager with interest in tech with the right people and they'll have a lot to show in no time
Being well-educated and well-connected doesn't necessarily mean you aren't great. The Sutherland boys were famously hanging out with Edmund Berkeley at his computer lab while they were still children, thanks to their mum knowing Berkeley through the General Semantics scene https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpadhttps://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... . It was also luck, as well as skill, that got Ivan enjoying sole use of the gigantic, cutting-edge TX-2 for hours every week in the early '60s. You nevertheless still have to hand it to him for creating flipping Sketchpadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad in 1963 at the age of 24. On the other hand, Ivan Sutherland had created Sketchpad before he turned 25.
I agree. My point goes rather in the direction that just because one doesn't have much to show by 14 y/o, doesn't mean they're less of a human than someone who does. Merit isn't a predictor of success, perhaps a requirement, but even that is dubious.
He was certainly precocious! A gifted kid, absolutely. But 'genius' is a lofty title. You'd usually need to be doing things differently and better, certainly by the time you're in your 20s. Maybe Infogami can make that case for him?
Thomas Sowell had good counter arguments against DEI. I recommend reading his book(s) including Social Justice Fallacies. The neurodiverse hiring stuff never even got me an interview. Even though I qualified for the programs and have the tech skills plus ASD, ADHD etc
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