I'm working on a long-term project to better understand Operating Systems, video game development, and Rust by building the simplest possible OS in Rust that boots directly into a game of Doom, which will also be re-written in Rust.
I'm giving myself 18 months- it's been super fun so far!
The author mentions that his father was in touch with a PE-backed chemical company a month before he passed, who re-engaged a month after- sounds like that might have been his succession plan?
Personally, I found looking at open source work to be much more instructive in learning about AI and how things like training data and such are done from the ground up. I suspect this is because training data is one of the bigger moats an AI company can have, as well as all the class action lawsuits surrounding training data.
One of the best open source datasets that are freely available is The Pile by EleutherAI [1]. It's a few years old now (~2020), but they did some really diligent work in putting together the dataset and documenting it. A more recent and even larger dataset would be the Falcon-RefinedWeb dataset [2].
Personally, I think the issue isn't one of degrees or qualifications, but rather one of values.
The CEO prior to this one (Muilenburg) also had degrees in Aerospace Engineering, but chose to value profit maximization over things like security and a good engineering culture. Innocent people had to pay the price for it.
You're right about Calhoun- I was actually referring to Dennis Muilenburg, the CEO who was fired in 2019 after the two 737 MAX crashes and the subsequent groundings. My comment wasn't clear enough- I'll edit it for clarity.
What are you proposing then? The CEO not do…CEO stuff? This is a common no true Scotsman argument on HN, where ‘real engineers’ are treated as some sort of shorthand for “someone that has the same values that I do”.
I think he is proposing that tech company CEOs have some hands-on engineering experience at least for a short while. I agree with that - "MBA only" bosses really have no idea what it's like to be on the ground. I can't even emphasize how true this is, "no idea whatsoever" is a huge understatement. I thought they were faking to be lazy at first, but they really don't understand that some people need to actually do the work and what goes into it. And I say that as an MBA/CFA before engineering.
The only meaningful proposal is to fundamentally rethink the culture that’s eaten American companies since the 80s.
The fundamental issue is fiduciary duty getting warped by people like Milton Friedman into the modern meme that executives are legally obligated to maximize shareholder profits (effectively always in the short term).
Boeing is just the next of many, many cases of companies being destroyed by capitalism run rampant.
In my country to be an engineer I have to have a university degree of a certain kind, then do a state exam for the national engineering association, then pay a yearly fee to remain an engineer.
I'm a bit discontent how just about anyone of my coworkers in USA can be a whatever engineer :D
I personally don't see a big reason why the CEO of Boeing needs a Engineering degree. This seems to me to be a scapegoat, there are plenty of bad CEOs with Engineering degrees.
I'd argue that the COO or another position needs to have this qualification and have the power to bring up these risks to the CEO/Board. Someone needs to understanding engineering, be close to the ground but also have the power to bring things up to the CEO to make appropriate decisions.
If you had one, you would know how much you need to suffer to explain to non technical people why a development direction is better than another, and how much it will profit the company in the end.
You could tone this better. The clearest argument is that cost cutting for stock buybacks involves the same thinking, whether accountant or engineer. Since 2014, the CEO is explicitly compensated this way.
I can't tone this better. And a request about tone - while completely forgetting about the real problem - explains exactly what I mean with engineers not being listened to.
Non technical people are always talking about themeselves.
The whole point is that the previous CEO and the one that arguably kicked off this whole mess did in fact have both a degree and background in engineering. Your mindset and business philosophy matters far more than your degree.
> Your mindset and business philosophy matters far more than your degree.
I completely agree with you, and therefore with the idea that having a background in engineering is still not a guarantee of success or even good practices or good business philosophy.
I disagree however with parent's implication about those difficulties being some sort of justification for malpractice, and my argument is that having engineering-capable managers should mitigate those issues in a properly managed company.
No, the whole mess was created by the old McDonald managers in the old merger. Muilenburg inherited the MAX from McNerney, but you can easily blame his predecessor Stonecipher for all that Boeing mess, when they moved to Chicago and outsourced everything.
Again, you can push the blame back and back and back in time, but putting an engineer at the helm doesn't seem to have righted the ship either. Then it's not clear why such a background is necessary or sufficient for the successor in that position. Arguably the more important criteria may be that a candidate be from outside the Boeing organization, thus making them better suited to see beyond the existing structure and culture.
Once a company like Boeing is put on the slippery slope, it keeps going down south, until you make radical changes. Notice that in most of these engineering driving businesses, the culture was built bottom up, right from the birth of the company. You are now trying to restore that top down. Its not really possible.
People don't realise how hard it can be rebuild the organisation once sufficient corruption has set in. If you do away with top talent, processes and promote regular career managers to run things for you, they will do everything in their power to ensure no right people will ever rise to a position of power. This is for a simple reason that they feel a threat to their jobs.
At that point in time, there is no way a company can resurrected bottom up. Your only options are getting some great talent and then tearing apart the whole company and rebuilding it over time. This is not even possible after a while.
So they just didn't know what luck was and invented their own definition to sound smart?
2 and 3 are definitely not luck, because it's affected by your actions. 4 can have partial luck, because people sometimes view you better or worse than you expect, and you can't predict your complete reputational outreach.
1 is the only definite piece of luck here, like being born to the right parents, or a stranger that you held the door for being the CEO that offers you a job.
If the stranger you held the door for being the CEO that offers you a job that is luck, but you would be stirring the pot if you were always super polite and held the door for everybody. This assumes that holding the door somehow led to the job offer which I think the original description assumes, based on how the English language generally works.
Aside from that in the stirring the pot scenario you apply to 10 jobs, two of them offer you jobs, one below market rate, one at market rate.
You stir the pot and apply to 100 jobs, 2 of which offer you jobs signficantly above market rate.
Stirring the pot is not strictly luck, but it is precursory to what is often described as luck and as such can often be described as a form of luck that you make yourself by adopting behaviors more likely to lead to lucky outcomes.
on edit: I see akamoonknight had the same thought I did, but didn't take as long to write the comment. Lucky.
It's funny because in that last sentence I think you're describing something like in the article. "Holding the door open" might not be something that people do to strictly have the potential to hold the door open for a CEO, but they definitely hit on that possibility more often than those who don't hold the door open at all. So is that "blind luck", or in the parent example (and i think sort of the articles) is that more along the lines of "stirring the pot"?
It's also interesting to think that IBM released an 8-trillion parameter model back in the 1980s [0]. Granted it was an n-gram model so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with today's models, but still, quite crazy to think about.
Interesting to see Robert Mercer the former CEO of Renaissance Technology is one of the authors on that paper. He is a former IBMer. If his name is unfamiliar he is a reclusive character who was a major funder of Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica and the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election.
I found some discrepancies when reading deeper into Mistral that felt a bit peculiar.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for Mistral AI [1] it lists the company as having 3 founders, one from DeepMind & 2 from Meta. This is consistent with what I thought- that it's an AI lab founded by engineers.
But if you go to Cedric O's Wikipedia page [2], it has Cedric O, a politician and former Secretary of State for the Digital economy, listed as a co-founder. The source cited is [3].
Furthermore, if you look at this post about Mistral's lobbying for the AI Act [4], Cedric O is said to be just an investor.
These discrepancies seemed a bit weird and suspicious to me; it felt like they might have been trying to downplay how close their ties were with the French government?
I don't know anything about the subject but it's worth noting that the article Wikipedia cites for listing the three founders, also specifically mentions Cedric as one of three additional "non-operational" co-founders.
My interpretation from the article cited on Cedric's Wiki page and published 6-7 months after launch is that he joined after and hence isn't one of the three original founders, maybe:
> O explains he was drawn to Mistral a few months ago first and foremost because of the ambition of its founders Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, Meta and Deepmind alumni.
Not saying you're wrong. But "he's not listed on Wikipedia" is a bit weak? Consider just adding him and the others if you figure out who joined when.
I think you're right and I clearly read too much into the Wikipedia pages, instead of looking for more primary source documents like those others have posted. I will be more careful in the future. Thank you for pointing that out!
For a company of Mistral's age, the term founder is quite fluid - people may not have been at the very start (Musk joined Tesla 7 months after it was incorporated)
Others say there were 6 founders, for example:
> Three of Mistral’s six founders, and its technical brains—Mr Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample ....
Thank you for sharing- upon reflection I should have been looking for primary source evidence like this instead of reading too deeply into Wikipedia pages, as someone else pointed out. I will definitely be more careful in the future.
Could I ask how you would normally go about trying to find memos like this for other companies?
Well, you made a worthwhile comment that triggered an interesting discussion, which luckily I had some knowledge about. I simply brought up new information to you. I don't perceive anything wrong.
I work in data and I'm french, so Mistral.ai has been on my radar a little more maybe. I was familiar with this memo before Mistral even released their first model. It was discussed a lot in France as this was the base for their first seed round that gave them 100 million euros in investment.
I still remember discovering & using numba for the first time in university. At the time I didn't know any programming languages except for Python, and wasn't super great at Python either. We had to write and run molecular simulations for our numerical methods and simulations class, and people were writing their code in C/C++ and were blazing through it.
I remember finding out about Numba through the High Performance Python O'Reilly book, and by just adding a single @jit decorator, my simulations were dramatically faster.
Amazing stuff, honestly felt like black magic at the time.
This paper analyzed ~14,000 users and I'm wondering if that's a big enough sample size considering there are 350M or so users on Twitter? Is there a statistics test you could use to tell?
Or is the number we should compare 14,000 to not the total number of users, but the subset of people who actually migrated, i.e. left Twitter entirely and joined another social network?
Are there any estimates for how many people in total that might be?
that has nothing to do with staffing. Korea has a uniquely hostile ISP market where service providers want to charge foreign services ridiculous amounts (versus peering agreements in most markets) for access to Korean consumer networks
Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.
It's a very good strategy as the Korean market is lucrative and the Korean companies have opportunities to spread worldwide. (they just suck at it)
Twitch got sent a foreigner-tax and didn't pay it, that's all. Korea already has a thriving version of Twitch called AfreecaTV. (edit: Oh it's not that thriving on their international site, maybe Korean site is better.)
>Korea has a philosophy of local conglomerates first and foreign companies only existing if they prop the local conglomerate up.
I don't doubt that there is some degree of domestic favoratism—it would be surprising if there weren't any—but Korea was for years the last bastion of Internet Explorer because of government requirements, as opposed to Chrome, Firefox, or some special Korea-reskinned Chromium. iPhone has lots of market share despite Samsung.[1] Relevant to this discussion, Korean players going back to Starcraft a quarter century ago were and are well known for competing in and livestreaming mostly non Korean-developed videogames.
[1] Yes, I know about Apple being a Samsung customer
No, they really just suck at it as a culture. Tech in Korea is terrible and startups are even worse. The culture may be set by this big players though, that's for sure. It's not about competition leading to this. This is just a "grab" based on the great success of international market trade from Korean companies like Samsung, LG, etc. The same way Facebook and others call Chinese tech terrorism, they earned the privilege locally to hinder competition.
Korea changed the pricing model for network traffic to be "sending party pays". For something like OGN that has a literal TV channel it's less of an issue, but for something like twitch that is only Internet, and tons of video, it's more difficult.
I'm giving myself 18 months- it's been super fun so far!