411–420 of 537 posts
AWS outages will become the norm?
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It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you. All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpet…
Well you do get that weird "ownership" concept, pushed on everyone by that bozo Bezos, where you are supposed to "act as owner" of the business, but get no benefits out of it, only the risks :)
Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.
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The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs. Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place f…
Bedrock is just hosting a bunch of different LLMs. It is just as capable as the third party LLMs it hosts. It hosts everything except for OpenAI and Gemini models as far as the popular ones. Even Nova, Amazon’s models, are good enough for the most part, cheaper and usually faster.
The unemployment rate in the US is climbing. If you look at a 5-year curve, it looks like nothing. But if you look at a 3-year window it's devastating. Seeing the highs of 2003 and 2009 it seems likely that it will continue to climb. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
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First, Andy led AWS to what it is today. Second, Amazon had a problem before Andy took over. Way too many managers and incompetent people in very senior levels. The fact that he's doing something about it is a good thing for Amazon. You don't become a CEO of a behemoth such as Amazon and expect to show impact within 6 months. It takes years. In terms of AI, they did invest in Anthropic early on and are a significant…
1. Lots of cracks showing in AWS before he took the big job, lack of focus, bloat of too many services with too few users 2. He then hired Adam to take over AWS which didn’t work out well 3. Good to see he’s cleaning things up, but we’re past the “clean things up” phase for a CEO. He’s been in role for a while now. That should have been the first few years of his tenure. 4. Anthropic was a good investment, but Amazon…
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"Firing" is becoming a bit more common in Britain, but still sounds like an Americanism to my British ears. I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.
"Made redundant" is another term for the latter.
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Ok so the US military is going to drop a nuclear weapon on Dallas or Buffalo to stop insurgents? Why even bother writing something like that when you know it’s stupid? Obviously governments have superior firepower and can and have quashed rebellions. But rebellions have been successful as well. Taking away arms from the people makes rebellion in the case of tyranny that much harder. I don’t think it’s unfair to quest…
Not to mention the army is composed of people who, despite systematic indoctrination, can decide to switch sides. However, this is a huge danger of ML ("AI"). It allows individuals to concentrate power. All real-world power comes from violence. Sufficiently advanced ML models allow individuals to profile subordinates and remove them before they rebel and (partially now but increasingly in the future) to control swarm…
Also, as an army veteran who served on active duty including a tour in Iraq (not direct combat role, thankfully) I can tell you that in my experience you're spot on - the systematic indoctrination isn't to a political party but it's to the military and to defending the country and the Constitution. That's up to interpretation. The military has never been faced with resolving a constitutional crises so we really don't know how things would play out - but not every soldier is a rabid Trump supporter or something. Far from it. Very far from it.
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What does the R stand for? This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same. Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome. --- In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same…
> What does the R stand for? Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point). > In a society which cl…
Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
> No, you are making this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
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> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication. Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being f…
"job loss" is purposefully passive to remove culpability from the entity (Amazon) that is making the active choice to terminate these people's jobs. It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".
In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.
Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?