I think you are misunderstanding the point of journalism. It can be debated whether the title should be such a question. Nevertheless, the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. You can see the attempts at the balanced part in the article where an allegation/statement is made about Altman followed by parentheses saying that Altman recalls the exchange differently/does not remember.
> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself.
I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem is that it's impossible.
There isn't time or space to present all the information; the journalist has to filter. And filtering is never unbiased. Even the attempt to be "balanced" is a bias--see next item.
"Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side". But what if the two sides really are unbalanced? What if there's a huge pile of information pointing one way, and a few items that might point the other way if you believe them--and then the journalist insists on only showing you a few items from the first pile, so that the presentation is "balanced"? You never actually get a real picture of the facts.
There's a story that I first encountered in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books, about two kids fighting over a piece of cake: Kid A wants all of it for himself, Kid B wants to split it equally. An adult comes along and says, "Why don't you compromise? Kid A gets three-quarters and Kid B gets one-quarter." To me, the author of this article comes off like that adult.
In any case, all that assumes that this article is supposed to be just straight reporting, no opinion. For which, see the next item.
> It can be debated whether the title should be such a question.
Yes, it certainly can. If this article is just supposed to be straight reporting--no editorializing--then that title is definitely out of place. That title is an editorial--and the article either needs to own that and state the conclusion it's trying to argue for, or it shouldn't have had that title in the first place.
> "Balanced" always seems to mean "give equal time and space to each side".
I agree with you that this seems to be the idea people have when "balanced" is mentioned. I don't think this is correct. You can easily have a balanced article which has lots of evidence pointing one way or the other. I think that this article is like that. Boatload of pointers towards Altman being a sly person with reporters asking him about those exchanges and him basically shrugging each time.
The journalists credibility is doing quite a bit of lifting here as we have to trust that they put in the effort. One such example is the molesting accusations which the reporters say they heavily looked into and were not able to find any corroborating evidence.
> You never actually get a real picture of the facts.
Yes, it is a fundamental impossibility in lots of cases. That's why we trust the reporters that they did as good a job as they could to present all pertinent information.
> That title is an editorial ...
I do not perceive it to be editorialised. It states an arguably real possibility that Altman may/does have lots of real power. I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation that points towards him being untrustworthy. If that is the case, I think those would be your biases knowing that he is probably not trustworthy. I see it just as an objective question.
Imagine a different situation: you have local elections into your small town. There is a new mayor candidate and during the next term, there will be some money to be given to residents for renovations and such, but not enough for everyone. You don't know this candidate. A local reporter, whom you trust, writes an article "New mayor candidate favoured in polls - will he be fair with the renovation money?". It is a piece trying to shed light on who this candidate is as a person, what was his life before moving into your village, etc. so that voters like you can decide whether to give him your vote. It is not editorialised, as it does not point either way.
> I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation
Yes.
> that points towards him being untrustworthy.
That points towards the article itself raising a question--which means the article should argue for an answer one way or the other. To ask the question in the title and then not argue for an answer in the article is a cop-out. It's trying to have it both ways.
An article that was simply going to report what was found factually, with no editorialization, would be better done with a title something like "Sam Altman: A look at the career of a key person in AI".
Oh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the article actually ending up with that answer. I see it waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well, we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he's doing is working.
MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.
MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.
The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.
Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.
Because their strategy for getting their applications in front of everyone has always been to get Windows in front of everyone, and that meant having to support third party applications that they chose not to try to incorporate into their own apps, but which got enough usage that not supporting them would mean losing those Windows desktops, and thus losing those users of the MS applications that were on every Windows desktop.
It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.
Microsoft was a language company at the start - they had a huge share in 8-bit computers and their BASIC made into the ROMs of almost every computer sold in the 70s and 80s. Then they branched out to applications, with little success (I remember Multiplan on CP/M, DOS, and Mac). When they started selling PC-DOS and MS-DOS they had no applications play to speak of. Office only came much later, and the apps that appeared for Mac, Word and Excel, were ported to Windows starting on Windows 2. Word for DOS struggled in the market and never reached a significant share.
In the sense of being marketed as a single integrated package, yes, I agree. I was using the term loosely to refer to the apps themselves (Word & Excel were the first two, as you note, the others came after).
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set to.
> clocks tick slower under the moon's weaker gravity. (Or is it faster?)
Compared to clocks at rest on Earth, clocks on board Orion right now are ticking faster, because it's at a high enough altitude above the Earth that the faster ticking due to higher altitude outweighs the slower ticking due to speed relative to the Earth.
That will be true for most of the mission. For clocks in orbit about the Earth, the "breakeven point" where the altitude effect and the speed effect cancel out and the clock ticks at the same rate as an Earth clock is at, IIRC, about 1.5 Earth radii. So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates).
For a spacecraft moving at escape velocity, which is going to be roughly true for Orion all the way until splashdown, I think the "breakeven point" is higher, at a little over 2 Earth radii. Orion will reach that point on the way back a few hours before splashdown, I think.
The Moon's gravity well is too shallow to make an appreciable difference in any of these calculations.
I should emphasize that all these tick rate effects are tiny, on the order of one part in a billion to one part in a hundred billion. Even when you add up the difference over the entire mission, it's still only on the order of hundreds of microseconds (i.e., the astronauts end up aging a few hundred microseconds more than people who stayed on Earth).
> So clocks on the ISS, for example, tick slower than Earth clocks; but clocks on the GPS satellites (orbiting at 4.2 Earth radii) tick faster (and there is an adjustment made for this on each satellite so that the time signals they send out match Earth clock rates)
I'm curious, and hope you or somebody else might be able to answer this: is it a single adjustment for each thing, where they just set it to always adjust by X ratio, or does it vary (enough to matter) as it orbits, such that the adjustment needs to be constantly varying slightly?
The exact difference in clock rates is not constant, because the orbits are not perfectly circular and the Earth is not a perfect sphere. So both the altitude and speed of the satellite, and the Earth's gravitational potential, are varying with time, and that means the clock adjustments will vary with time as well.
For the GPS satellites, their time signals are constantly compared with ground clocks, and adjustment signals are sent up to the satellites as needed to keep their clock corrections in sync with ground clocks.
I'm not sure what, if any, adjustments are made to clocks on the ISS, or how they're done.
Thanks! I figured the orbital paths not being exact circles meant they'd be slight variance in the difference, just wasn't sure if it was enough to matter or if they could treat it as if it was exactly the same all the way around without it mattering.
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit.
They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal.
> Earth's gravitational dominance extends 4x the distance to the moon
"Earth's gravitational dominance" is not a single thing; it depends on what kind of "dominance" you're talking about.
For example, even though the Moon is usually described as being in orbit about the Earth, its orbit is always concave towards the Sun. In other words, its net gravitational acceleration is always towards the Sun--even when the Earth is on the other side of it from the Sun. So by this criterion it's not in orbit about the Earth, it's in orbit about the Sun, doing a complicated do-si-do with the Earth, also in orbit about the Sun.
I'm not sure what definition of "dominance" you're using that extends the Earth's "dominance" to 4 times the distance of the Moon.
This video explains what you’re talking about re the moons orbit always curving toward the sun, and also mentions Earths gravitational dominance.
It’s about the suns gravitational pull on the moon dominating over the Earths gravitational pull on the moon, but that due to the centrifugal force (there isn’t one, so conservation of angular momentum) the Earth's gravitational pull dominates.
The statement I made about acceleration due to gravity was with reference to an inertial frame centered on the Sun, in which there is no centrifugal force. The video you reference takes that viewpoint during its first part.
The claim about centrifugal force refers to the Hill sphere, which is a different notion of "gravitational dominance". The basic idea behind that is that, while the Sun's force on the Moon is greater than the Earth's, it varies in space, in the region where the Earth and Moon are orbiting, much less than the Earth's does. So we can "subtract out" the Sun's gravitational force, so to speak, since we can approximate it as constant in the region we're interested in.
The video, however, bungles this somewhat, because its claim about "centrifugal force" is made in a frame which is centered on the Sun--but rotating at the same rate the Earth revolves around the Sun. But nobody actually uses such a frame! Doing that would be silly. The natural frame for us on Earth to use if we "subtract out" the Sun's gravitational force to analyze the Earth-Moon motion is a frame centered on the Earth.
In this frame, we can say that the Moon orbits the Earth, not because there is some "centrifugal force" canceling out the Sun's force, but because we've subtracted out the Sun's force by centering our frame on the Earth. Or, to put it another way, we're treating the whole Earth-Moon system as freely falling in the Sun's gravitational field, and as long as the Sun's field is, to a good enough approximation, constant in the region we're interested in, we can simply ignore the Sun's gravitational force. (This viewpoint is much more natural in General Relativity, where "gravity" is not a force at all to begin with.) Such a frame is called an "Earth-Centered Inertial" frame, and it's the frame that's being used, for example, to manage the Artemis II spaceflight.
> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon
And all the others are negligible by many orders of magnitude compared to the moon. So it's really just the moon as far as this photo is concerned (except for the small sliver that's still illuminated by sunlight, including refracted sunlight).
I think this is exactly what's been happening ever since the ad-supported business model for the Internet began to spread. None of the big tech companies know what their services are actually worth to their users. The only way to really find out would be to have users pay for them, but that's a nonstarter now.
What something is worth and what it costs are two different things. The big correlation is that if something costs more to produce than it's worth to the customer, nobody is going to make it. But if it costs less to produce than it's worth, who gets the surplus? In a competitive market, it's mostly the consumer rather than the supplier, because customers pick the supplier with the best price.
What ad-supported services did is zero out the price of anything that costs less to provide than the amount of ad revenue it generates. But the amount of ad revenue companies get per-user is already pretty small and companies are demonstrably willing to provide the existing services for that amount of money, so we know the upper bound and it's not that high.
> What something is worth and what it costs are two different things.
Yes, surplus is a thing, I agree. But that doesn't materially change what I said. The thing still has to be worth at least as much as it costs for users to be willing to pay for it, so what users will pay at least sets a lower bound on what the thing is worth to users. (Note that it can be worth different amounts to different users; the more precise way of stating it would be that in a competitive market, price equals marginal cost equals marginal value, i.e., value to the marginal user, the user who just breaks even paying that price for it.)
> What ad-supported services did is zero out the price of anything that costs less to provide than the amount of ad revenue it generates.
Which also uncouples the price from any measure of value to the user. The price is now measuring the marginal value to the ad purchasers. The value to the users can be anything greater than zero--the fact that they're using it at all means (or should mean, if the users are rational) that the value to them is positive. But it could still be less than the cost to produce. And the worse the user experience gets, the more likely it is that the value to users is less than the cost to produce, even if that cost is small.
Plus, there's a whole other piece of this that the analysis we've just done doesn't even capture: externalities. One simple way of stating what many people think is wrong with the ad-supported business model is that it creates large negative externalities that, on net, mean that the value to users is negative--but the users don't see the externalities so they don't realize this, and the tech companies have offloaded the costs of the externalities onto others, so they don't see them either.
> Note that it can be worth different amounts to different users; the more precise way of stating it would be that in a competitive market, price equals marginal cost equals marginal value, i.e., value to the marginal user, the user who just breaks even paying that price for it.
In a competitive market the price only depends on the value to users in the sense that it's required to be lower than that to make any sales. If something costs $1 to produce in a highly competitive market then the price is either going to be ~$1 completely regardless of how much more value people get from it than that, or no one will value it at even $1 and then no one will produce it. This is why farmers are always on the edge of bankruptcy even though their product is "without this you will die". Actual competitive market.
> Which also uncouples the price from any measure of value to the user.
It uncouples the lower bound. If the production cost is $1 but the user only values it at $0.50, now it still gets produced as long as the advertiser is willing to pay $1 to show the user the ads. But depending on how much you value not having ads, that could still be good. You got $0.50 worth of value without paying anything.
> And the worse the user experience gets, the more likely it is that the value to users is less than the cost to produce, even if that cost is small.
The real problem here is, they can do something you value at negative $10, but the advertiser will pay them an extra $0.05 to do it, and then they do it because "you're not the customer, you're the product".
In an idealized market this doesn't happen because then you just pay them the incremental $0.05 instead of the advertiser, but we've been screwed by the regulatory environment on both ends. For the seller it's hard to accept small amounts of money from arbitrary users without doing business with a fickle payment intermediary that wants to take a huge cut for small transactions and can shut down your business on a whim with no recourse, and for the customer it's hard to make a tiny digital payment to a service without linking it to your identity, which is often the exact thing you were trying to pay something to prevent.
But that seems like more of a problem caused by not having a good anonymous digital payments system than one caused by advertising. The advertising is just the infelicitous workaround.
> but the users don't see the externalities so they don't realize this
Externalities are when the costs are imposed on someone who isn't a party to the transaction. What you're describing is an information asymmetry.
In theory those can be solved just by providing the information to the users so they can make a better decision, but that's assuming the market is actually competitive. If e.g. you like Android and have one but don't like Google spying on you, are there viable alternatives to Google Play and the other Google services? Judging by how many people actually use them instead of the Google ones, big no. But then we're back to this really being a different problem again, this time antitrust.
> In a competitive market the price only depends on the value to users in the sense that it's required to be lower than that to make any sales.
That's a restatement of what I said: price equals marginal cost equals marginal value--the value to the marginal user, who just breaks even by making the trade.
> It uncouples the lower bound.
Which you've already agreed is the only connection. So again you're just restating what I said.
> You got $0.50 worth of value without paying anything.
First, this is irrelevant now because the advertiser got at least $1 of value (or perceived value) in exchange for $1. The user wasn't a party to that exchange at all.
Second, the user didn't pay any money, but they did pay with their data. But they don't see that cost; it's a negative externality. And it's turned out to be a pretty large one.
> The real problem here is, they can do something you value at negative $10, but the advertiser will pay them an extra $0.05 to do it, and then they do it because "you're not the customer, you're the product".
If I actually assign negative value to using the service, I won't use it at all. They can't mine my data if I don't give it to them. I personally am in this exact position with respect to, for example, Facebook.
If the negative $10 is the net of all externalities, then yes, I can end up using a service that actually makes me worse off, because I don't see the negative externalities.
> Externalities are when the costs are imposed on someone who isn't a party to the transaction.
Yes; in this case the costs of having their data monetized using ads are imposed on users, who aren't a party to the ad transaction.
> What you're describing is an information asymmetry.
I suppose it could be viewed this way, in the sense that the services don't share with users all the relevant information about how their data is used. In many cases they share practically none of it.
> that's assuming the market is actually competitive
In the sense that there are massive thumbs on the scale, yes, I agree the markets in this area are not competitive.
> That's a restatement of what I said: price equals marginal cost equals marginal value--the value to the marginal user, who just breaks even by making the trade.
The thing you're saying is backwards; the consequence rather than the cause. If the price is $1 and it can't be lower than that because that's the production cost then the user who is only willing to pay $0.90 doesn't buy it, but that has no effect on the price one way or the other.
If that user doesn't exist and the user who values it the least values it at $100, there is no user who is only breaking even. Every user has a surplus of at least $99 vs. not having it and the price is still $1 because there are a dozen companies willing to sell it for $1 who don't want to lose business by charging more than the others.
> Which you've already agreed is the only connection. So again you're just restating what I said.
It's the only connection in a competitive market. Not all of them are competitive.
> First, this is irrelevant now because the advertiser got at least $1 of value (or perceived value) in exchange for $1. The user wasn't a party to that exchange at all.
They are party to it though. They didn't pay money, but they paid in attention and have the option to patronize a different service if the market is competitive. And if it isn't then it's that rather than the ads which is the problem.
> Second, the user didn't pay any money, but they did pay with their data. But they don't see that cost; it's a negative externality. And it's turned out to be a pretty large one.
There are forms of advertising where this isn't required, e.g. you can be pretty effective with search advertising by basing the ads entirely on the search query while knowing nothing whatsoever about the user.
Obviously they then collect the data too because it makes the advertising marginally more effective, but that's the thing where you'd like to pay a nickel to have them not.
> If I actually assign negative value to using the service, I won't use it at all.
The service doesn't have to end up underwater for something stupid to be happening. You could have valued it at $15 originally and then the advertiser pays an extra $0.05 to reduce your $15 value to $5. It's still a positive number but you would much prefer to pay the extra $0.05 yourself than to lose $10 in value, except that's currently unreasonably hard to do.
> If that user doesn't exist and the user who values it the least values it at $100
In a competitive market, which is the case being talked about in what you responded to, that's impossible. If the production cost is $1, more users will keep buying the product until the marginal user values it at $1. If there are no users who value it between $100 and $1, then you don't have a competitive market; either the product or service is too specialized to permit real competition (which is highly implausible for the kinds of services we're talking about), or someone has their thumb on the scale.
> Not all of them are competitive.
The market not being competitive doesn't create any connection that isn't there in a competitive market. So it doesn't change what I said.
> They are party to it though. They didn't pay money, but they paid in attention
The transaction in which the users pay with attention is not the same as the transaction where the advertisers pay the tech company to get their ads shown. The latter transaction is the one I was talking about in what you responded to. The user is not a party to that transaction.
> you can be pretty effective with search advertising by basing the ads entirely on the search query while knowing nothing whatsoever about the user.
Yes, you do know something about the user: what search query they entered. True, it's not as much information about the user as they collect in other ways, but it's still information about the user. If I enter a search query for Depends, Google knows something about me that's of value to advertisers.
> The service doesn't have to end up underwater for something stupid to be happening
True, but irrelevant to what I was saying, or what you were saying that I responded to.
"None of the big tech companies know what their services are actually worth to their users".
The users are the product. They sell their attention to the advertisers. And they know exactly how much that attention is worth, because they use auctions to set the price.
In other words, you agree with me that the tech companies don't know what their services are worth to users. They know what their ads are worth to advertisers, which is not the same thing.
They also basically don't care what their services are worth to users, except in the very weak sense that the services have to be sufficient to get users to use them. But that's an extremely low bar.
> When I'm done writing this comment, I'll probably go back to doomscrolling on walled-garden social media for a while.
I won't. I don't do social media. I have a Facebook account but I never use it. I don't even have a Twitter account. I don't use TikTok or any other such apps. If I'm using my smartphone and it's not for a call, texting, or an essential app like my bank's, it means I'm reading an e-book on it. (It's true that I get most of my ebooks from walled gardens--Google and Amazon. Unfortunately the vast majority of freely available ebooks are simply unreadable because of crappy formatting. But it's still not social media.)
But I'm an extreme outlier. I wish I weren't, and to be honest I'm not sure I understand exactly why I am. But that's how it appears to be.
How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.
I mean, there is discussion and a sense of community here. I’m not sure what exactly defines social media, but this is more than just a link aggregator.
Old forums weren't called social media. I think for it to be social media it has to be about your social graph, here on HN I almost never read peoples names and I don't really connect with people so it isn't social media, its just media with comments.
If I could subscribe to peoples feeds and such then it would be social media, but HN doesn't have that feature.
> there is discussion and a sense of community here
That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social media" didn't even exist yet, nor did the business model of trying to monetize people's online data.
There's a massive whitewashing of what "social media" is. I don't feel there's one singular definition but I could be wrong, maybe I am the one who missed the boat. But I'd really love to see it quantified more
eg "Social media leads to addiction!" - ok take Facebook
Are you referring to
a) non-chronological feeds? Who knows what posts you'll actually find? You come back for more. You can't just log off for a week and come back and the most recent posts are there (you don't even see everything, the platforms regularly hides stuff). That's certainly addiction
b) fake notifications? That's fraud, and certainly addiction
c) the corollary of a), you don't know who's seen your posts so your mental model gets shaped. That's certainly addiction
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
I would say social media is any website where the connections between the participants are as important or even more important than the content. As soon as you get 'followers' it is game over.
The first Google search hit for the UK variant of the law[1] says this:
This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not?
AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
Depends on what you consider "practically its entire existence": the same could be said of Google Search if we are looking at how long they did not compared to the rest of the time, but I distinctly remember the period when they did not and when I recommended them to my entire social circle as The Search Engine (compared to Yahoo, Altavista, MSN or whatever else was there at the time) or The Social Network (compared to MySpace, I can't remember anything else that was comparable).
The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.
> "it was the O-rings" explanation seems universally believed and sanctified by no lesser authority than the Nobel prize laureate Richard Feynman.
If you read Feynman's account in the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, you'll see that he realized afterwards that he was prompted to make the demonstration he made at a NASA press conference--putting a piece of O-ring material in a glass of ice water, clamped with a C-clamp, and then taking it out and releasing the clamp to show that the material did not spring back--to get public attention focused on problems with the joint in a way that could not be ignored. But, as has been pointed out downthread, when the joint was redesigned, the new design did not change the O-rings at all. So the specific issue that was shown in Feynman's demonstration was not the issue that actually needed to be fixed. It was just a convenient way to show the public that there were problems with the joint, with a simple demonstration that everyone could understand. Trying to show the actual problem--that the entire joint design was fundamentally flawed and needed to be changed--would not have worked in a context like that.
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