Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes.
AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.
My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven.
Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?
A major consideration is that the state holds a monopoly on violence. A single person defending their citizenship with a gun might be morally right, but they will end up physically dead. And a few hundred foreign-born citizens with guns might make the news but will end up equally dead.
Unless a HUGE portion of the country decides to take up arms at the same time, the second amendment isn't going to make the difference. As the administration's policies seems to be affecting individual groups one at a time, I doubt that enough people will be willing to lay down their lives over any single issue.
I am generally displeased with the way social media has evolved, but I'm not in favor of this lawsuit. It seems like a way to blame tech companies for Congress' failure to regulate businesses properly. None of the engineers involved thought of their work as a way to rot the minds of future generations. Their thought process was straightforward-
1. We sell ads to make money
2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money
3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.
I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.
Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.
Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.
That seems like a really bad excuse to void responsibility. Consider a cigarette maker:
1. We sell cigarettes to make money
2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make
3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.
Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.
Cigarette companies were not penalized for making addictive drugs or doing generally immoral but technically legal things. They were penalized because the USA had set a minimum age for smoking cigarettes, and they were marketing directly to people who could not legally buy their products, and there was conclusive proof that they were targeting minors with their ads.
The DIRECT comparison from my previous comment would be if a country set a legal age requirement for accessing social media, and then you could hold the social media companies if they continued marketing to them. But for now, no such law exists in the USA. Social media has not been regulated like tobacco, because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to regulate these companies.
Many people don't remember, but in early 2020 just prior to COVID shutting the world down the US and Iran were near war- the US even assassinated one of Iran's important military commanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleima....
Most people worldwide don't remember, but Iran is most certainly aware that Trump was president when that happened too. Most US presidents tried to find some balance with Iran, but Trump seems to want to be an antagonist.
I remember and was a bit taken aback when it occurred. Soleimani while being linked to a terrorist org was also assisting the US military at the time. There must have been something going on behind the scenes that was never documented or I never read because he was one of our assets.
> how is ownership established if there is no single source of truth?
Oh, boy, let me tell you it is very disconcerting to pay a title company to do a search of legal records on a property, and the only guarantee they offer in some states is that "we didn't find anything suspicious but there is no guarantee that someone from the past won't pop up with a better claim to ownership. You can't hold it against us if that happens." How is it that most people making the biggest purchase of their lives are going along with that? I'm definitely not okay with it, but sometimes you can't buy property without accepting it- no title company will offer a stronger guarantee.
For details, I'm talking about how in some states the Special Warranty Deed is the standard for real estate purchases: https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-is-a-special-warrant.... A title company will guarantee that the current seller hasn't entered any agreements that might legally obligate you (such as offering the property as collateral for an outstanding loan), but they are very clear that actions of previous owners are not included in this guarantee. So there is no single source of truth- we just hope that we're not part of the tiny percentage where the special deed is insufficient.
Edit: for context, there is a distinction between title insurance and the deed itself, but the title company is only offering insurance on the deed, so if the deed only covers the previous owner then the insurance only covers that too.
No, what you describe is the entire purpose of owners title insurance. The idea that it “only covers previous owner” is false, it covers a wide variety of title defects.
I was getting ready to debate you, but I'll admit that I'm mostly wrong about title insurance.
Special warranty deeds only cover the current seller, but title insurance can defend against prior ownership claims. I will note that just because title insurance guarantees they will defend against ownership claims, they don't guarantee it will be settled in a particular way. There's a theoretical possibility that an agreement can't be reached that keeps you in the house you thought you bought legally- like in this story the buyers got their money back but didn't keep the house that wasn't theirs https://www.thetitlereport.com/Articles/Title-Insurance-at-W...
> I will note that just because title insurance guarantees they will defend against ownership claims, they don't guarantee it will be settled in a particular way.
Of course, insurance doesn't guarantee you won't have a covered loss. Insurance compensates you if you have a covered loss.
When I've purchased real estate with title insurance, the offer from the title company has been pretty specific about what risks are covered, what risks are specifically not covered, and what the dollar limits are for covered losses. There's a lot of paperwork involved in purchasing real estate, but the title report and the title insurance offer are worth taking the time to read.
I've read the terms of title insurance and no, you can't hold them liable if it turns out you don't get the property as intended. It's basically useless.
It makes sense that you can’t hold an insurer liable for the very thing they are selling you insurance against. The insurance exists to make you whole if you, e.g. pay earnest money and then someone disputes your title.
You might have written software that is "done" if you compile it with a single compiler version and don't use any OS hooks/APIs and don't care if future changes breaks your software. I.e. it's done if you think that people will stop needing to use it at some point in the future.
A tool like sudo can never be done because it integrates with the constantly updating OS and will always need maintenance.
1. What in the circular funding? This feels more like a financing scheme founding it under X/Twitter and then spinning it over to SpaceX. I suspect some debt is disappearing or taxes aren't getting assessed because of this move.
2. The only thing harder than harnessing "a millionth of the sun's power" on Earth would be launching enough material into space to do the same thing. And that's not even a reason for SpaceX to own an AI company, at least not at this point. The current AI isn't going to help with the engineering to do that. Right now hiring 20-somethings fresh out of college is way cheaper and SpaceX has been very successful with that.
quick edit: dang, I even got point 1 backwards. xAI owns X/Twitter, and that means that SpaceX now owns X/Twitter as well as an AI company. Super suspicious that SpaceX could actually think that buying the social media part (a significant portion of xAI's value) would be worth it.
I wouldn’t bet on it. If the baseband modem has access to location data then it could send it without the OS being able to intervene. I don’t know about Pixels, but many devices are highly integrated now that I would want some real thorough and specific research before I trusted that an OS could block the modem from sending location data.
A common approach to research is to do literature review first, and build up a library of citable material. Then when writing your article, you summarize the relevant past research and put in appropriate citations.
To clarify, there is a difference between a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited), and cited work (a direct reference in an article to relevant work). But most people start with a bibliography (the superset of relevant work) to make their citations.
Most academics who have been doing research for a long time maintain an ongoing bibliography of work in their field. Some people do it as a giant .bib file, some use software products like Zotero, Mendeley, etc. A few absolute psychos keep track of their bibliography in MS Word references (tbh people in some fields do this because .docx is the accepted submission format for their journals, not because they are crazy).
Congrats on having a successful mission, it seems quite successful for a first try, and you clearly have some talented people on your team. But I’m going to give you my unsolicited opinion on the writing style.
The writing style sounds more like a tech bro describing some weekend conquest, and is wholly unappealing to most of the space industry (or at least the ones with decision making authority). Your CMGs were “locked in,” several times you “nailed it,” and so on.
You might have a business strategy that I’m not aware of but I’d expect that most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits, and they don’t talk like this. Most startups and tech bros aren’t spending money on space. It’s big established corporations that can fund this kind of stuff. Write like them. You can talk like a tech bro and get seed funding, but if you want to get to a sustainable business you have to talk corporate.
I would hate for your company to get passed over for lucrative opportunities because your public image seems immature. I looked at your website and you have a bunch of ex-government people on your senior advisory board. Get their opinion on your writing. It sounds silly, but you significantly lower your probability of winning contracts if people see you as a team of “bros.” People don’t want to spend millions on guys who are “locked in.” People want to spend millions on people who do professional engineering and risk reduction and clearly communicate how professional and competent they are.
I ranted way too long about your writing style. It’s pretty cool that you were able to design your own bus and most of it worked.
I agree. If it wasn't written with an AI I would be shocked. Its got the classic "VLEO isn’t just a better orbit for imaging — it’s the next productive orbital layer." mdash and all. That style sends strong signals of lazyness, scammyness and unprofessionalism.
Why would I take a company seriously when they can't be bothered to write their own press statements and blog posts?
> most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits
that um... doesn't sound like the space market. The engineers involved won't care about whether it's big corporate speak or GPT-ish gushing about "nailing it", they'll just want to understand if its a suitable bus for their mission concept and how well it works. It's actually more candid than your average blog in that respect.
It’s not the engineers who have the money or the control of company decisions. The engineers might make recommendations to their PMs and director of whatever program, but when considered against the myriad other bus options in LEO, the decision makers might be scared off by this writing and choose a less risky bus and accept the worse imaging performance or performance degradation in whatever other payload they integrate.
Bus options are a lot thinner in VLEO, and I don't think even decision makers purchasing something utterly generic are scanning company blogs looking for excessive use of slang and GPT sentence patterns as a reason to veto technical decisions. We're talking about an industry in which executives generally are engineers and often love flaunting their nerdiness and the most successful player is also the world's biggest social media troll. The US defense lexicon they'll have to master to bid on that type of contract is way more cringeworthy than bro-speak anyway...
> The writing style sounds more like a tech bro describing some weekend conquest, and is wholly unappealing to most of the space industry (or at least the ones with decision making authority). Your CMGs were “locked in,” several times you “nailed it,” and so on.
This is on the company blog. It ends with a call to action to either subscribe to their mailing list or explore their careers page.
It has the right tone for the goal. Tone policing isn’t helpful. The authors are even here answering questions which is very nice of them.
Yes it is, these are YC alums. A significant portion of that program is learning how to pitch to investors. Are you saying that YC wastes this effort? The goal of this post might be to recruit engineers to hire, but it is public facing and part of their image that anyone might read, including future customers. It doesn’t help to recruit good engineers but be unable to sell because the industry expects strict professionalism.
it looks like Toppher Haddad has two writing styles, the tech bro blog , and the style he used above to discuss the technical aspects of there optical technolgy, and that is high geek, high uber geek of the type generaly associated with an inability to comprehend others lack of incomprehension, so actualy an unusual integration of skills and aproaches
AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.
My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
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