I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall.
Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.
What kind of success are countries having finding technical talent with the right savvy fighter mindset to sever the dependence on an aggressive and culturally-entrenched threat?
(Even the ordinary open source world has a lot of intrigue to be careful of. And most developers still think nothing of pulling in a fleet of dependencies from PyPI/NPM/Cargo/etc. as well as third-party network services. Everyone is being taught in school to play to FAANG interview rituals, and many go on to a career style of performative sprints. HCI is almost lost as a field to UX euphemism. Almost no one can deploy a system that won't be compromised, and most don't even try, except for some mandated ineffective theatre. AI homework-cheating mindset isn't helping. Etc. Not to complain, but to be clear the kind of inertia a country is facing.)
Do the countries wanting to fight this have enough of they right homegrown talent already, and know how to find and nurture it?
If they're importing additional talent, do they know how to find and incentive the right people, while turning away the ones with the wrong mindsets for this mission?
(ProTips: Look for the hardcore privacy&security non-careerist nerds. The left-leaning, societal-minded ones. Give them what they've been looking for, or support to help make what they've been looking for. Don't offer to pay too well. Anyone who asks "Why would I want to live in your country, when I can make more money elsewhere?" gets a permaban.)
And the US is much richer for them (monetarily, and culturally).
But what if home countries had said, "We can give you the resources you need for your work and home life, and it will be for purposes you can believe in and feel good about; not for crypto rug pulls, nor for surveillance capitalism, nor for stunting and manipulative social media"?
Apple PR did what they could with the art they had available and the need to pander to a gov't administration, but weren't inspired to do it more genuinely?
Around that age, I wrote a letter to Tandy (Radio Shack), proposing that I write a hobby electronics book.
In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.
I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.
Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.
Recent: Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras (bloodinthemachine.com) | 456 points by latexr 2 days ago | 293 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47095134
Biggest risk is that a beam steering element stops while the emitters are running. Basically impossible with a phased array emitter like the article discusses.
And you'd probably have to be staring into the laser at close range while it was doing that.
The laser beams usually aren't tiny points like your laser pointer. Several centimeters across is more typical, especially at typical road distances. Your pupil is very small in comparison.
The optical hazard calculations are a very early part of the design of a LIDAR system, and all of this does get considered. Or should anyway.
Biggest risks are for people involved in R&D, where beams may be static and very close to personnel.
> I bet you that if they ban one they ban the other too
Related: I've had a suspicion that, if you have an Apple or Google app developer account through a company (in your name and recovery phone number, but company email address)... and you leave the company... you'd better hope that someone at the company doesn't then use the account to do something sketchy or rule-breaking.
Someone inheriting the account is a very real possibility, given motive (people can be lazy about figuring out how to set up the account for another developer, or not want to pay another fee), and opportunity (professionalism norm is to preserve all passwords/secrets in a way that is accessible to the company).
> They explained that they switched between multiple models from multiple providers such that no one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing.
Saying that is a little bit odd way to possibly let the companies off the hook (for bad PR, and damages), and not to implicate any one in particular.
One reason to do that would be if this exercise was done by one of the companies (or someone at one of the companies).
Right now, this standard recruiter question is on the side of the table that's often being especially penny-wise and pound-foolish...
A weird thing I'm seeing is early AI startups lowballing both salary and equity for AI startup jobs, compared to a few years ago for generic Web/app developer jobs.
You're in a narrow opportunity window of a massive investment gold rush. You probably got funding with a weak/nonexistent business model, and some mostly vibe-coded demo and handwavey partnership.
Now you need to hire a few good founding engineer types who can help get the startup through a series of harder milestones, with skillsets less clear than for generic Web/app development. If you can hire people as smart and dedicated as yourself, they'll probably do things that make a big positive difference, relative to what bottom of the barrel hires will do.
So why would you lowball these key early hires, at less than a new-grad starting salary, plus a pittance of ISOs that will be near-worthless even if you have a good exit.
Is it so that the founders and investors can have the maximum percentage of... something probably less valuable than what they'd get by attracting and aligning the right early hires? (Unless it's completely an investment scam, in which genuine execution doesn't affect the exit value.)
I’ve also noticed this, and it causes real issues long term when you want to build the product. Suddenly management is surprised your senior engineer with no relevant experience is taking a long time and needs to bring in a half million in consultants to actually do the work. It stresses everyone else out and then you end up with a lot of churn, a lot of burn, and very little internal knowledge to build off of for the future
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center
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