Oppenheimer was considered to be a left wing agitator, there are tons of very smart people who are pro labour organization which the US has historically seen as left wing agitation.
> I can think of a couple who were absolute nightmares. I can think of a couple others who were an absolute dream. The worst small-time landlord was WAY worse than the worst big property management firm, but the best small-time landlord was far better than the best big property management firm I've been a tenant of.
This is basically my experience I wrote about above, the downside risk for mom and pop landlords is way way worse than corp landlords in my experience (and pretty much everyone else I know).
I (and most of the people I know), have had the opposite experience as you. Essentially everyone I know has moved into corp landlord situations because the downside risk is a lot lower and there is a paper trail if you need to dispute anything. I have like a 50% hit rate on mom and pop landlords being awful, I can give three examples off the top of my head:
1. New landlords bought a place I was living in and wanted to do in their words "minor upgrades to the house", but during the construction they would "keep it livable" and not require me to move. I came back after work one day to my water being off (and a toilet removed), and they didn't turn it on for two weeks after that (and kept the toilet removed). I had to get a lawyer involved for rent reimbursement.
2. My water heater broke and flooded my house in the middle of the night. The landlord took 1 month to start fixing the completely flooded apartment, and then the landlord tried for a year (threatened legal action as a bluff) to get me to pay for the new water heater despite it being their property, and maintenance being in the lease as their problem. I obv never paid because it was basically just a shakedown.
3. My landlord tried to just not pay me a month of rent owed after they sold the property with me living in it. He called me several times trying to "make a deal", and I told him that it was a cost associated with him selling the house and that I would not leave until he paid me the month owed. He waited until literally the last possible day to pay me and yelled at me on the phone that I was being unfair despite it just being money he owed me.
Every corp landlord I have had has been by the book. Yes my rent has gone up marginally, but at least there is a paper trail and they do not try to do any of the crazy stuff I just described.
That being said, I did have one mom/pop landlord who built me a deck with a bike locker over the course of a summer once, that guy was great.
I think all we are learning from this thread is that there is a non-trivial number of tenants who are terrible and there is a non-trivial number of landlords who are terrible. The activity of renting a home is fraught with risk that your counterparty is terrible. The two parties' financial interests are often opposed, and state and local law tends to incentivize at least one and sometimes both parties towards being terrible.
I would never want to be a renter again, and I also have no interest in becoming a landlord.
> What makes you think DOGE is being blasé with personal data?
Why should a government agency run by a random unelected tech ceo even have the option to be blasé with personal data? Like I thought this website was pretty vehemently against things like the Patriot Act giving the NSA granular personal data and backdoors into communication, that at least had the guise of "national security" backstopping it. Giving a new department personal data access for no reason other than "government efficiency" (no actionable goals given by the department btw) is significantly more tenuous than "national security".
Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the carbon they captured back into the atmosphere
That's only true under certain circumstances. Sometimes the biomass accumulation is permanent.
My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).
>Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state), you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:
You can plant trees (or any plant really as long as they grow fast) and then bury it so that the carbon won't get released or at least very slowly. There's an older thread discussing this idea [1].
CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.
100%, I was talking specifically about just tree planting. Trees are great capture tech, but horrible storage tech, so tree planting alone is not a good carbon capture solution. Biomass burial is (imo) a great and relatively simple solution at the moment because we have a bunch of empty mines to use. There is also research being done on putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that, but I can't find a link for it at the moment.
If there are more trees in 10 years than there are now, and we keep that number relatively steady, won't that mean less CO2 in the atmosphere? Individual trees may die and decompose, but they can be replaced.
As you add more trees (and the globe continues to get hotter), the risk of forest fires increases. In theory you are correct that we could just keep increasing tree amount, but in practice that will be difficult in a lot of the world as it gets hotter. Trees (and algae) are great capture tech, but horrible long term storage tech. There are currently interesting proposals on how to long term store wood and other biomass for sequestration but I'm unsure if any company is doing them at scale yet. Off the top of my head there is burying the biomass in mines, and putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that. I can only find a link for one of the two after quick googling.
but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day. And aside from direct human intervention, there's desertification that's not getting any better.
Interesting, didn’t know it. Did you read the page in question?
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As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
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When trees die, they’re consumed by fungi, and the carbon is sequestered in humus (soil). That’s totally fine, and in fact is an important reason to ensure that planted forests have a fungal culture so this decomposition process occurs properly.
You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.
If you are worried about security or IP at all, it's preferable to run locally, or spin up your own box that you can query running one of these models.
I understand the reasons for not wanting to use a remote LLM. My question was about how useful local LLMs are. It might turn out that for some people remote LLMs are unacceptable for privacy reasons and local LLMs are unacceptable because they aren't good enough to be useful.
He also was Algerian so meant that quote literally rather than figuratively, and consequently he had a lot more skin in the game when compared to Parisians like Sartre.
Anecdotally this is mostly correct, but I also have heard non tech people acknowledge how hard it is to get parts/repair the cars as a downside as well.
They are part of his core argument, but not the entire argument. The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company. This is atypical, most of the time you lose that right once you get rid of your shares. It seems like he is arguing that he was misled and sold his shares because of that, which will be hard to prove if true, and even if it is true, isn't really illegal.
I believe at the time it was reported that Musk and the OpenAI board chose to part ways due to his for-profit AI research (in Tesla) posing a conflict of interest to the OpenAI mission.
Hence his argument boils down to "You made me sell my shares because my 'closed' AI research conflicted with your 'open' non-profit ideals. However, you have since stoped to adhere to your mission statement, effectively seizing to publish your research findings and pursuing for-profit goals. As a consequence of this I have lost a bunch of money."
And as nuts as Musk is, I kind of see his point here.
That argument doesn't really hold a lot of water with me to be honest. If I sell (forced or otherwise) my shares in company because it isn't working on tech I agree with, and then they pivot and start working on tech I agree with and their shares pop, I am not entitled to sue them for damages.
In the scenario you described above, you would be entitled to sue for damages if you sold shares in a company under false pretenses because the other owners deceived you.
Imagine being the part-owner of a bread focused bakery. You tell the other owners that you think the business should focus on pastries – even if everybody agrees that bread products are more important – as pastries make more money (that money can in turn be invested into the bread business).
The other owners hard disagree and ask you to leave the company, because a) that does not fit into their bread-centric mission and b) you own a pastry-supplier in town and would obviously be profiting from this move. So you sell your shares and move on, no harm no foul.
But what if they then turn around and start producing pastries, claiming it's only doing so to financially support their bread business? What if they start entering lucrative deals with other pastry-suppliers and effectively stop making bread?
In this case I would argue that you would be entitled to some portion of your foregone gains. You sold your stock while being under the impression that the company would never go into the direction which you deem is the *only viable one*, only to find out that they did exactly what you suggested after you left.
> ... because it isn't working on tech I agree with, ...
Please notice that this is not what happened. They all agreed on the tech to be researched. The only disagreement was the business model and company structure required to fund the research.
> under false pretenses because the other owners deceived you.
Even your bread/pastry scenario doesn’t quite make this part clear. And this is what will be difficult to prove - did OpenAI know and discuss a rug-pull of “we willingly plan to say we’re going to be doing non-profit work, but actually our plan is to be a for-profit company”.
If their pivot was pre-meditated then I could see Musk having a case, but if they pivoted purely from market factors and realizing they wouldn’t be able to cut it as a non-profit, I’d think he’s SOL
But please reread the comment which is the root of this discussion:
> The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company.
I was never arguing that Musk is entitled to damages. I am merely arguing that it is possible to not own the shares of a company and be entitled to damages. Whether Musk specifically is owed damages is something a judge has to decide.
In the exact case above, you would have to prove intentional deceit (which is quite difficult to do) and even then that isn't actually illegal on its face a lot of the time in non publically traded companies. Further, the timeline isn't as compressed as your comment suggests, if the bread focused bakery pivoted to pastries 4-5 years after you sold your stake in it I do not agree that you would be entitled to damages at all, businesses can and should be allowed to pivot. Selling stock under the impression that a company wouldn't go in a direction you expect, is a normal part of investment and there is nothing wrong with it, people make bad bets all the time.
IANAL but I don't think that intentional deceit is necessary to prove Musk's case, negligent misrepresentation might suffice. And I agree that the judge ultimately has to rule whether or not the time-period between the ousting and pivot is reasonable; this decision would probably be based on precedence, the specifics of the case and the judges opinions.
However, please remember your comment which is the root of this discussion:
> The (imo) shakier part of the argument is that he is entitled to damages even though he doesn't own shares in the company.
I was never arguing that Musk is entitled to damages. I am merely arguing that it is possible to not own the shares of a company and be entitled to damages.
