of the frontier labs i like GDM most then OAI.
why do you like Apple?
Apple has been gradually ruining MacOS for over a decade. The alternatives are worse. I wish Steve Jobs hadnāt died.
would you have worked at Apple during the Jobs era? what makes apple different?
thoughts on Google DeepMind and OpenAI?
maybe. i donāt know what their office politics was really like under Jobs. I hear it sucks now.
thoughts on Google DeepMind and OpenAI?
so many problems
Commenting as I go:
Iāve heard of similar things with airlines. A podcaster I watch had two totally different experiences with getting refunds for issues with flights. When he was going through/was in America they more-or-less were screwing him over, but when was in Europe, due to a lot of consumer protection laws, they much more easily got a refunded.
Wild how they expect(?, or maybe they donāt and are trying to screw people over or they donāt think about it because most of their clients are U.S. or something so they donāt need to really worry about visa stuff) people to just be able to get visas that fast.
hmm. i know one way people handle this kind of thing is with credit cards i think. afaik i think if you booked this all with a credit card company and then explained how virgin wonāt give you a refund a cc company will just refund you. wild solution.
crazy how you have to fight for something like that. in this sense makes me wonder if i actually have an issue with certain consumer protection laws that would prevent something like that. like i think in a theoretical way iām against it, but these laws seem pretty good/helpful to me.
i like her respond at the end that its the right thing to do regardless of the terms and conditions, put differently, and maybe she wouldnāt say this, just cause its in the terms and conditions doesnāt mean its not a shitty thing to do.
Why against? What do you prefer?
I think I prefer consumer protection laws that guarantee the ability to get a refund in situations like that. I donāt like that just because the contract says you agreed to get credits, you should be forced into getting credits when theyāre screwing you over like that. But then part of me thinks thereās something wrong with that because, I mean, you agreed to a contract. So you should be held to it. However, then there are issues with the bargaining power of companies and stuff.
I guess I prefer consumer protection laws like that. I donāt know how to reconcile that with you signed a contract. Or, I guess in this context, I donāt think there should be a consumer protection law. I have the libertarian(?) minded view that we should be free to contract with these companies as you please and one issue with those consumer protection laws is that I think they prevent those kinds of contracts? Like I think Iād be ok with those laws as a default rule of sorts, but as an always guarantee I donāt know.
One thought is if we were going to be really strict with those ācontractsā (which generally arenāt signed by anyone), we should start by strictly enforcing them on the companies that wrote them, not the consumers (whose alternative was to see similar contracts at other companies, then avoid doing business with most companies).
Companies break their own terms of services frequently. Also, they unilaterally change their terms of service and refuse to honor terms that were present when you signed up.
on reflection it occurs to me that i did the not-speaking-up thing here. i wanted to ask more about what the problems with GDM and OpenAI are, and what made apple different, and why jobs was an exception. was he more rational than most? was he able to fight the system better for some reason? but i got a sense from your reply that you didnāt want to go further, so i dropped it.
I didnāt mean to give that sense.
OpenAI was a non-profit that betrayed its original mission and seems to have broken contracts. Musk (who I donāt like) was a donor, and they took his donations then changed into a for-profit company giving him no stock. Heās suing them and is right as far as I know. The OpenAI board tried to get rid of Altman (for violating the mission and being a liar) but lost the power struggle. Altman has multiple other scandals. OpenAI presumably torrented millions of books like Meta and otherwise violated the rights of authors and artists (including me). These things are public knowledge so itās hard for me to comment usefully on this kind of issue without knowing where youāre coming from. I donāt know if you havenāt looked into these companies much or have counter-arguments to many of the standard criticisms or what.
thanks, and sorry for misinterpreting. this kind of thing happens a lot though. people use plausible deniability and say they were just busy, and usually asking someone why they arenāt responding properly or being cold is considered rude. social dynamics are weird man.
to answer your questions re: openai, i am aware of the standard criticisms and i side with some of the counter-arguments. i donāt like Musk either now btw. i used to like him but he changed a lot. iām skeptical of the āstole from donorsā narrative he is arguing. OAI published emails from back then showing Musk himself supported a for-profit structure and actually pushed for them to have a PBC-style setup when he was trying to take control of it. so his lawsuit feels a bit hypocritical now, and a judge even recently denied his request to block their restructuring.
the copyright suits are serious, but as far as i know theyāre still in the trial phase arguing over fair use boundaries vs piracy, not settled findings of fact.
but even if we table OAI and whether they are awful or not, that still leaves the other part i was asking about.
if basically every large corporation is awful, what made Apple under Jobs an exception to your rule? what specifically did you like about him, or what made him able to run a non-awful big company when almost nobody else can?
I donāt see how Musk wanting OpenAI to be for-profit in one manner, in one context, makes it hypocritical for him to complain about the actual thing they did later after refusing his advice. Sure it had some similarities to what he wanted but also significant differences. I donāt know a lot of details about this, but if I donated millions of dollars to a non-profit which they used as essentially seed money for a for-profit company that I got no stake in, I would be upset.
As far as I know, Apple under Jobs was bad in lots of the usual big corporation ways. For example, one time they advertised that if you buy a computer, a display, and a warranty for the computer, the warranty would also cover the display. I did so. The display broke. Customer service said that the offer on Appleās own website was a mistake and was only supposed to cover some other computers, not the one I bought. Someone messed up the wording. Supervisors on the phone refused to fix it. I had to send a paper letter to Apple to get what they owed me.
Jobs himself was involved in making deals with other large tech companies not to offer jobs to each otherās employees, thus keeping wages down. According to Claude, Jobs was actually the principal instigator and went so far as to threaten to sue Palm for patent infringement unless they stopped offering jobs to Apple employees.
Jobs had some good taste and intelligence, and made some good products, though.
what did you mean by calling him the one special exception? in what sense?
Well I wrote:
I liked and respected Steve Jobs, but he was the one special exception, and heās been gone for a long time now.
I meant I broadly donāt like or respect the other CEOs.
I can often write short, curt posts that arenāt warm and friendly, or I can write fewer posts. Social dynamics can cause them to be taken as unfriendly, but theyāre actually me being friendly and replying more than most public intellectuals would have.
Youāre welcome to post a lot and ask a lot of questions as long as I can write short replies, and not reply to other things, without it being taken negatively. These things go together :) (Bringing up the same topic again that didnāt get an answer is fine btw, though itās usually best to change something, e.g. doing more of your own analysis or asking a different question about it.)
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so Jobs/Apple wasnāt an exception to the broad big companies are awful pattern then? just an unusual case of some good taste and product judgment inside an otherwise bad big corporation?
addition: i took Jobs as an exception to mean he was one of the few relatively rational CEOs, and Apple under his return era wasnāt a typical awful big company.
Hereās some praise for Steve Jobs: Daring Fireball: Trump on Tim Apple
you could find praise-worthy traits in a lot of major tech CEOs. praise-worthy traits donāt by themselves make someone an exception to the broad big companies are awful pattern.
is the Jobs/Apple point that Apple under Jobs was actually an exception to that pattern, or just that Jobs had some good traits inside an otherwise bad big corporation?