wlxd
3mo ago
Can you explain how it is a problem? It's not immediately clear to me, and it's apparently not immediately clear to most of the legal systems around the world, given that they do not subscribe to the extensive application of this doctrine.
wlxd
30d ago
No, Le Pen was convicted based on creative application of mundane campaign finance laws, not based in expanded policing powers on the street. That’s my point: if the government turns into tyranny, it’s because it wants to, not because street cops are given more powers to deal with hoodlums.
wlxd
4mo ago
No, parsing bits from a video file does happen practically instantly. Download a video file to your local disk, and play it from there, you’ll see. Even on YouTube, if you rewind back, it will have to represent the bytes again.
The reason it takes a while for YouTube stream to start is that this is what it takes for YouTube to locate the bytes you asked for and start streaming them to you.
wlxd
4mo ago
That scarcely seem to me like something to worry about. We already need IDs for many normal activities. Having those issued on federal level would not change much, and in fact would probably be an improvement for reasons like Voter ID.
wlxd
7mo ago
For small ones, easiest way is to walk to their back, then quickly place a 7x7 patch of gun turrets with construction drones, and then manually loading them up with red ammo by quickly ctrl-dragging around (you need to have lots of ammo in your inventory). They die before they have a chance to drop one lava bomb.
wlxd
3mo ago
What this means in practice is that if talk to the perp, and you indicate or imply in any way whatsoever that he is expected to answer your questions, the conversation is now custodial interrogation, and if you don't mirandize the guy first, your case is fucked.
wlxd
4mo ago
I don’t understand what you mean, eg
But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons
What exactly do you mean by “not intercompatible”?
wlxd
4mo ago
Do you know for a fact that new GPT models include native voice modality, versus some sort of Whisper preprocessing stage? I’m asking, because a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to /u/jkf that this is most definitely within the potential range of capabilities of frontier models, with him being skeptical.
wlxd
4mo ago
How do you know that this is opposite? How do you know that it is not the best, or even not a good way to tackle this problem? This sort of argument would be more convincing if there was an alternative way of going about doing this that was clearly better. Do you know any? I don’t. On the other hand, I know that Elon Musk has a track record of using very similar procedures across his companies, and in these cases, they apparently have been very successful.
I think that we will find out quite soon whether this was a good plan or not.
No, I don’t have strong opinion one way or the other, I’m just saying that “transcribing a song is expensive so there is no way Grok is doing that to answer a text question” is a very bad argument. Grok could do that if it was trained with audio modality, but I don’t know if it actually does.
wlxd
4mo ago
Syria and Lebanon are outside Europe and thus outside the responsibility of the EU anyway.
Imagine what the world stage would look like if US shared this attitude.
wlxd
4mo ago
This argument proves too much. It’s not an argument specifically against federal ID cards, but against any and all ID cards, including state issued ones. Given that none of this is a problem with state issued IDs, I don’t find this vision very likely.
wlxd
5mo ago
If you don’t have any credit history, you have good credit, not bad credit. I have arrived in US with no credit history at all, and at no point my credit score was below 700.
wlxd
6mo ago
You’re right that grid scale storage is not very economical, but I was thinking a bit about this: doesn’t Norway have good geography for large scale hydro storage? Basically, dam up the fjords, and pump them high with water.
wlxd
2mo ago
For one, had he been given any kind of notice and chance to challenge his removal, one imagines he could have raised the issue of his procedurally-valid and as-yet-not-revoked withholding.
One could imagine a process that would have prevented the issue, but none such process was due him, and even if there was, as I keep saying, a mistake could have happened after that process was completed. For example, imagine he got a notice he is getting deported to Venezuela, tried to appeal it, failed, and then on the deportation day there is a mix up and he accidentally gets put on a bus that gets people onto a plane to El Salvador.
One can also look at someone detained and removed in the middle of the night and conclude that this is not enough process.
Sure, but in my opinion, the process is already very excessive. For example, I think that the standard procedure should be that people who never had valid immigration to begin with, should only get to appeal their deportation after already being deported.
wlxd
3mo ago
It's easy being an AI advocate, I just have to wait a few weeks or months for the people doubting them to be proven wrong haha.
Often you don’t even need to wait, doubters often say things that are wrong already when they say it. Remember Gary Marcus? He was big a couple years back, but everyone learned to ignore him after basically everything he said was wrong.
wlxd
4mo ago
I'm not really sure what your disagreement with me is then other than risk appetite and investment value.
Well, let's go back to how this exchange began, maybe that will help clarify things. I said:
When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
You then replied:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing. If so, then they are likely making far less than the 300k TC.
And then I spent a number of posts explaining to you how incorrect this attitude is. My arguments were highly successful, to the point where you are arguing against your original statement, saying that $10k would be a low ball offer for "their fake money that is worth literally nothing", and in fact, the actual value "is entirely dependent on the individuals estimation of its long term payoff and the time horizon on which they want a return on it". Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I was trying to get across the entire time.
My stance this entire thread is that Average MLEs working at xAI make the a likely comparable comp to other MLEs at other FAANGs, which is ballparked at 300k to 350k.
Let me then helpfully quote yet again my original post:
So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
And indeed, I am exactly correct: X AI valuation in May 2024 was $24B, and in Dec 2024 they raised another $6B, resulting in $50B post-money valuation. This is 80% increase in stock price. Assuming they got RSUs, and that their comp split was 50% cash 50% stocks, the $300k is now worth $420k (blaze it). If (which is more likely), they got options, instead of RSUs, then assuming, say, 30% gap between stock price implied by 409A valuation and the preferred price (you know what these two are, right?), then their $150k/year worth of stock options granted at May 2024 valuation is now worth $500-600k/year (if you don't understand how I came up with this number, X AI's Grok will helpfully explain it to you, just copypaste this paragraph to it verbatim, and enable Think mode).
Of course, if they got options before the May round, they might be making over $1M/year now.
Maybe, I'm likely to be wrong, betting against musk seems like a bad idea but at the same time the man just keeps betting on black, eventually he's going to lose and I currently do not see the value difference that xAI has over its entrenched rivals. A non-woke ai is great but I'm not sure to will convert into monetary value. I also think he made it to piss on Sam Altman in their little spat.
I largely agree with all of this.
I argued this point from my personal beliefs as someone who is in a position to go potentially work for xAI, it's not an abstract argument like it might be for you.
You are completely unwarranted in making this assumption, and you're only saying this to be nasty towards me. It's a really cheap shot, doubly so because I cannot show how wrong you are without doxxing myself. You can do better than this.
It does matter but there are so many of these companies that call you when you do AI/ML that they all blend together.
Maybe they do for you, but I have higher expectations of success for companies ran by Elon Musk, and value them accordingly.
But just because an investment is currently worth $0 doesn't mean you should cash it in for the first lowball cash offer.
I think you just use the word “value” and “worth” in a much different way than most people who deal with stocks do. By my definition, if the stock is worth $0, then any offer above $0 is not lowball. You seem to be interpreting it as “stock value is what it trades at on public markets” which is not that far from how I interpret it when talking about public companies, but completely useless and confusing when talking about private companies.
Most people understand that level, I guess you don't, or you desire to be obnoxiously pedantic.
I encourage you to try the following exercise. Pick any person, and ask him to name something he owns that’s literally completely worthless, as in, worth $0 to him, and offer to buy it for $10,000. Do you expect him to reject this offer, or eagerly jump for it?
Your argument was that someone is making 448k salary, you've pretty much agreed with me that no one at xAI is making that
No, I never said that someone is making that. All I said that this is reasonable range for cash compensation at a place like X AI, and that these ranges are only published to satisfy California labor law.
they might get equity but realistically since xAI isn't seed funded that equity is worth how much Musk decides it is.
No, Musk is not deciding that. Right now, X AI investors are deciding how much it is worth by deciding how much they are willing to pay for the stock they are buying from Musk.
And that's only if the company goes public
I already explained to you that private companies often offer liquidity before the company goes public, and we know that this is true about Musk companies in particular. I gave you a news article about SpaceX tender offer. If you are having trouble understanding what these words mean, I recommend asking Grok for help.
Yes, but there aren't that many people of that caliber to go around, and they charge wayyyy more than 448k in cash.
Yes, which is why I said that these ranges are irrelevant, and only there to satisfy California labor law, because equity is what matters.
wlxd
4mo ago
The Wlxd stance seems to be that is 450k TC and I would be stupid to turn down nearly half a million! I could work there for 5-10 years and retire early!
No, my stance is that you need to use your judgement to decide how much the stock is worth to you, taking into account all relevant data points. For example, you should consider the likelihood of that company succeeding or going bankrupt, and incorporate it into the expected value. You implicitly ignore this when you say that
[the] startup (...) is (...) trying to do the next big LLM/LLM Agent/LLM dongle/Dohicky/Whatever.
as if it didn't matter what the startup is actually doing. It does. Similarly, for me, there's a difference between how much I value Blue Origin vs SpaceX equity.
You put the labor in, but it's a toxic workplace and is killing your mental/physical health so you quit and forfeit. How much is that comp worth?
Working in toxic environment might command a pay premium? Wow, I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.
More seriously, obviously you should take this into account while valuing the compensation offer you received.
Because after all, you value it as $0 or somewhere low like that. However like any MLE, you are a smart fucking cookie and you look at your $250k salary and the estimated 200k equity you have and think 10k REALLY?. Would you really be so dumb as to take literal pennies on the dollar for your equity?? It's not worth anything now and it very likely could never be, but 10k is fucking chump change, pardon my french.
The point of my $10k offer was to argue that the equity in a private company is not worth nothing, contrary to what you said. This argument was extremely successful, because you are now arguing for my side, telling me that the stock is worth more than $10k, and that the owner of that stock should hold out for better offer than mine.
I've been in this field for a bit and know of zero no-name MLEs who make 448k salary. Maybe an Ian Goodfellow, or a Yann LeCun would command that sort of cold hard cash.
Have you considered that maybe X AI is trying to attract talent of this caliber?
In any case, the salary brackets in job postings for this segment of the market have no actual relevance for anything. Everyone knows that equity is where the action is, and since the California law does not mandate including equity compensation in these brackets (as if there even was a reasonably useful way to do that), nobody cares about these figures.
wlxd
4mo ago
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.
wlxd
4mo ago
What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.
As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.
Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it.
What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.
I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
Improving elections integrity, for one thing.
Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.
Oh, we can continue applying the doctrine to illegal wiretaps just fine, that's not my problem with it. My problem is things like, if you fail to recite a specific magic incantation before your suspect confesses to the crime, you must disregard that confession.
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