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Comment Re:Reference? (Score 1) 18

I definitely know people making over $2M/yr, most of it in RSUs. $10M seems like director/VP kind of money for these companies, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

It's worth so much more in investor capital for companies to pay big bucks for the *apperance* of a technical acumen in AI that they're willing to have a very small number of high profile experts making the big dollars just to keep the money flowing in. Even if said experts are doing jack shit, are just talkers, or working their own agenda. Ultimately even $10M is chump change for these companies, they can afford it and it's not their money anyway. Investors are dumb enough to keep throwing money into the fire, so everyone is happy. Until they're not.

Comment Re:Remember (Score 1) 18

I agree it won't last long, but there is a "magical" or "high priesthood" aspect to it for now (or put more pragmatically - trade secrets). If it were just a matter of going through some set of well-defined steps, even hard ones like getting a PhD from Stanford, way too many people have done that for $10M pay packages to happen.

I guarantee you that a mid-level research scientist in AI from non-distinguished company is not making $500k per year in flat salary.

Comment Re:So when are the lawsuits coming? (Score 1) 11

I actually think that's the way to go. There needs to be a law about whether AI is allowed to learn from content on the same terms as a living individual, or not. Then there also need to be technical means to enact whatever policy is legislated, which is here this Cloudflare technology could fit in.

Comment Re: Not just ND jobs (Score 1) 40

... I guess in the age of LLMs the horse has to be fed water from a bottle.

The point is that SF86s only apply to a subset of the jobs these folks are applying for.

Therefor demanding clearances does not solve the problem unless you demand clearances for jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with natsec.

Which will never happen, because (a) it would be a ridiculously stupid waste of time, money and effort to screen people for risks that have nothing to do with the job to be done, (b) and even if folks wanted to OPM would never go along with it.

Comment Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score 1) 124

Unless you work for some mickey mouse web company or similar doing unimportant BS, then problems are best solved and designs generated when everyone is together in a room with a white board.

In your world. Not in everyone's world. The part you seem to ignore is that now you are relying on people's memory about important details unless you write down what happened like in a summary email or other documentation.

Then you don't work in a serious company if they don't minute important meetings.

Bahahahahaha. Have you actually worked for a serious company? Meetings happen all the time. Sometimes key people are not available for every meeting. Should things be documented? Yes. In things called emails. You seem to still insist that work can ONLY be done in meetings. According to you.

Comment Monopolies need regulation (Score 2) 50

Nobody else but the prison system can set the price of calls to the prison system, so they're milking it. (Oddly this was also true when I lived in the dorms at college, before cellphones).

I don't think its' a matter of taking it easy on the prisoners, it's mostly a matter of not highway robbing their loved ones, who haven't done anything wrong.

Comment Not just ND jobs (Score 2) 40

I work for a large financial firm. I'm sure we have some government contracts somewhere in the company, we're huge. But we're definitely not national defense, the large majority of our businesses are consumer-facing.

And we interviewed one of these.

A few little things made us think the application was weird. Then during the interview, they claimed to be from a smallish place in New Jersey. One of our people grew up close to there and asked some questions about local things. They had no idea and covered poorly. Then my coworker just blurted out, "you're North Korean, aren't you?"

Dude immediately bailed on the call.

I assume the goals were money, data access and maybe access to the network. In any case, they aren't just going after defense actors.

Comment Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score 1) 124

The problem I have is your insistence that every thing must be done in person. That is not necessarily true. Things can be discussed over email, zooms, phone calls, messages, etc. I can count the number of the times where work was delayed because the requirements were specified verbally and no one wrote them down. And then a game of telephone happens when multiple people disagree on key requirements and deadlines. There were no emails, no texts: just everyone insisting that everyone agreed on their interpretation of what happened in a meeting.

Comment Re: Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score 1) 124

It should be part of the written specifications as sometimes—hear me out on this—not everyone who works on the project can be present at a meeting. For example if they join the team later. My company is cheap and refuses to pay for a Time Machine so people can attend a meeting in the past.

Comment Re:Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score 1) 124

I'm all for home working, but some jobs simply require teams to work in the same physical location - eg safety critical engineering. I speak as someone who worked in aerospace.

The complaint was not that some people work better when physically located near team members. The complaint was Musk insisted that people work in open offices specifically or they cannot work for him.

You CANNOT have something slip through the net because it was missed on a teams chat or email, people have to literally and figuratively be in the same room when discussing important topics. If you disagree then fine, but you're the wrong person for the job.

So you would rather rely on people’s memory of verbal communications instead of relying on records of written communications? That seems more ripe for failure. However, part of every engineering project I have been a part is the insistence on written documentation for things like specifications. There are procedures for things like requests, changes, approvals, etc. These systems are now electronic so a piece of paper does not need to be located in a specific filing cabinet. That can be done remotely.

Comment Re:Ignoring the obvious (Score 1) 124

Now we're whining when a new company that has never done a lunar mission before, has a failure on its first mission. A mission with a vastly smaller budget than NASA had in the 1960s, too.

We are not whining. We are warning people not to automatically believe ambitious promises that such efforts are easy. Here on slashdot, some people are already promoting Starship on how it can deliver 100 ton payloads cheaper than anyone else. The word "can" has not been demonstrated yet.

Comment Re:Musk doesn't have the best people. (Score 1) 124

You've got a point there but you left yourself open to the counter: Musk also managed to ferry people to the station at a price NASA couldn't match with the shuttle.

Er. No. People at SpaceX did. People seem to forget: Musk is not an engineer. He has limited understanding of the engineering. He just likes taking credit for the work his people do.

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