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If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers.  You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.

being part of a Corporation means that the signal to noise ratio changes dramatically.  The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. An ever increasing percent of our time went to non user value creation tasks and that changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.

the salaries are so high and the options so valuable that it creates many misalignments.  The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.  Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family. The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments.  This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.

The Ai Pin makes the same conceptual mistake behind all the assistants that preceded it: to treat all people as if they were so utterly helpless and clueless to manage even basic stuff. And to grossly miscalculate which tasks people find tedious and willing to delegate to a machine. These assistants want to assist with stuff people have no problem doing themselves, and they do so through an interaction model that ultimately makes things more awkward, impractical, and longer to accomplish. (On the other hand, it’s a good interaction model for people who have different types of motoric or visual disabilities and need assistance when sending and receiving messages, collecting information, etc.).

Instead there’s this urge to create The Next Big Thing that will be a hit for everyone, everywhere. And to create it in one fell swoop, skipping all the steps that might help you really get there.

Marvel licensed the filming rights of the X-Men and related concepts, such as mutants, to 20th Century Fox, who created a film series based on the franchise. Years later, Marvel started their own film franchise, known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which focused on characters that they had not licensed to other studios (see below). At the time, the rights to Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were disputed by both studios. As they both held the rights to the characters, with Fox citing the characters' mutant status and being children of Magneto and Marvel citing the twins' editorial history being more closely tied to the Avengers rather than the X-Men, the studios made an agreement wherein both of them could use the characters on the condition that the plots did not make reference to the other studio's properties (i.e. the Fox films could not mention the twins as members of the Avengers while the MCU could not mention them as mutants or children of Magneto).[215] The arrangement became moot following the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney – the parent company of Marvel Studios, and the confirmation that future X-Men films will take place within the MCU.

From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The laws aimed at criminalizing trans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.

there is no star of such magnitude who more cunningly positions themselves as apolitical than Beyoncé. Her performance as an icon is meant to connect with the broadest number of people possible. To do that, her refusal to stand for anything specific beyond the watered-down treatises on Black excellence must be maintained.

More than anything, Renaissance is a testament that Beyoncé is a brand that stands for absolutely nothing beyond its own greatness

In the near future, transforming text will become as commonplace as filtering images. A new set of tools is emerging, like Photoshop for text. Up until now, text editors have been focused on input. The next evolution of text editors will make it easy to alter, summarize and lengthen text. You’ll be able to do this for entire documents, not just individual sentences or paragraphs. The filters will be instantaneous and as good as if you wrote the text yourself. You will also be able to do this with local files, on your device, without relying on remote servers.

Initially, many of Photoshop’s capabilities were adaptations of analog effects. For example, “dodge” and “burn” are old darkroom techniques used to alter photographs. There are countless skeuomorphic names throughout digital image editing tools that refer to analog processes.

Text seems like it would be easier to manipulate than images. But languages have far more rules than images do. A reader expects writing to follow proper spelling and grammar, a consistent tone, and a logical sequence of sentences. Until now, solving this problem required building complex rule-based algorithms. Now we can solve this problem with AI models that can teach themselves to create readable text in any language.

With iA Writer 7 you can manually mark ChatGPT’s contributions as AI text. AI text is greyed out. This allows you to separate and control what you borrow and what you type. By splitting what you type and what you pasted, you can make sure that you speak your mind with your voice, rhythm and tone.

As a dialog partner AI makes you think more and write better. As ghost writer it takes over and you lose your voice. Yet, sometimes it helps to paste its replies and notes. And if you want to use that information, you rewrite it to make it our own. So far, in traditional apps we are not able to easily see what we wrote and what we pasted from AI. iA Writer lets you discern your words from what you borrowed as you write on top of it. As you type over the AI generated text you can see it becoming your own. We found that in most cases, and with the exception of some generic pronouns and common verbs like “to have” and “to be”, most texts profit from a full rewrite.

we believe that using AI for writing will likely become as common as using dishwashers, spellcheckers, and pocket calculators. The question is: How will it be used? Like spell checkers, dishwashers, chess computers and pocket calculators, writing with AI will be tied to varying rules in different settings.

We suggest using AI’s ability to replace thinking not for ourselves but for writing in dialogue. Don’t use it as a ghost writer. Because why should anyone bother to read what you didn’t write? Use it as a writing companion. It comes with a ChatUI, so ask it questions and let it ask you questions about what you write. Use it to think better, don’t become a vegetable.

Once you come to the realization/acceptance that no one – not even the interested, motivated, and committed — has the kind of focused attention available for your thing that you assume they have, you will have a much better chance of capturing and sustaining any of it at all.

Ask as few actions of your audience as possible, and provide as little information to support those actions as possible. Everything else that you could put on your screen is a distraction.

This paper maps concepts from AI alignment onto a basic, three step interaction cycle, yielding a corresponding set of alignment objectives: 1) specification alignment: ensuring the user can efficiently and reliably communicate objectives to the AI, 2) process alignment: providing the ability to verify and optionally control the AI's execution process, and 3) evaluation support: ensuring the user can verify and understand the AI's output.

the notion of a Process Gulf, which highlights how differences between human and AI processes can lead to challenges in AI control.

Haynes has here made a film that might seem comic to one, irretrievably tragic to another, possibly within the same scene, line reading, or surprising camera gesture—appropriate for a film about the derangement of living one’s life as an idea, an outline, an empty vessel on which others project expectations and judgments that only reflect their own biases.

Taste, by definition, is the ability to be decisive about what you like and what you don’t like, and exclusively seek out the first. In other words, good taste is a sign of good judgment. Want to have good taste? Get comfortable with saying ‘no’.

While there were undoubtedly people who came in for the food, worked 3 hours a day, and enjoyed their early retirements, all the people I met were earnest, hard-working, and wanted to do great work. What beat them down were the gauntlet of reviews, the frequent re-orgs, the institutional scar tissue from past failures, and the complexity of doing even simple things on the world stage. Startups can afford to ignore many concerns, Googlers rarely can. What also got in the way were the people themselves - all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something, all the leaders who lacked the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth, and all the people that were hired without a clear project to work on, but must still be retained through promotion-worthy made-up work.

Another blocker to progress that I saw up close was the imbalance of a top heavy team. A team with multiple successful co-founders and 10-20 year Google veterans might sound like a recipe for great things, but it’s also a recipe for gridlock. This structure might work if there are multiple areas to explore, clear goals, and strong autonomy to pursue those paths.

Good teams regularly pay down debt by cleaning things up on quieter days. Just as real is process debt. A review added because of a launch gone wrong. A new legal check to guard against possible litigation. A section added to a document template. Layers accumulate over the years until you end up unable to release a new feature for months after it's ready because it's stuck between reviews, with an unclear path out.

we must demand an immediate end to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, which is causing an enormous number of civilian casualties and is in violation of international law. Israel is at war with Hamas, not innocent Palestinian men, women and children. Israel cannot bomb an entire neighborhood to take out one Hamas target. We don’t know if this campaign has been effective in degrading Hamas’s military capabilities. But we do know that a reported 70 percent of the casualties are women and children, and that 104 U.N. aid workers and 53 journalists have been killed. That’s not acceptable.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party was explicitly formed on the premise that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” and the current coalition agreement reinforces that goal. This is not just ideology. The Israeli government has systematically pursued this goal. The last year saw record Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank, where more than 700,000 Israelis now live in areas that the United Nations and the United States agree are occupied territories. They have used state violence to back up this de facto annexation. Since Oct. 7, the United Nations reports that at least 208 Palestinians, including 53 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces and settlers. This cannot be allowed to continue.

The blank check approach must end. The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency. That includes an end to indiscriminate bombing; a significant pause to bombing so that massive humanitarian assistance can come into the region; the right of displaced Gazans to return to their homes; no long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza; an end to settler violence in the West Bank and a freeze on settlement expansion; and a commitment to broad peace talks for a two-state solution in the wake of the war.