(I was definitely not the oldest in the room - I think I was like the 2nd or 3rd youngest.)

Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.

There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.

They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented.

I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.

Subjectively it felt like I lived about 5 years in the first 2 months after my first kid was born - certainly they were more memorable than the previous 5 years. We were basically confined to the apartment except for doctor's visits during that time period, but the experience of caring for a little person was dramatically different from everything that came before. And then the newborn periods of our 2nd and 3rd kids flew by, because we had all the routines down.

2020 also felt like I lived a lifetime in a year, even though we were shut-in, because of all the events and changes of routine that year.

Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.

I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

Another way to put this is "Do you feel comfortable shorting NVDA tomorrow morning based on this news?" Because if Huang is removed it's very likely they will face challenges finding and reacting the next big use-case for GPUs, not to mention capitalizing on AI (which already is seeming shaky for other reasons). If you're completely confident that this will result in his removal, it seems like there's easy money to be made here.

Personally I don't feel comfortable enough to put my money where my mouth is. I'd give it even odds, but even odds, to me, is not enough to say it'll go one way or another.

> While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information.

> Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.

> The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.

My interpretation of this is simply this is what you do when you are the board of a public company and the U.S. government has accused your CEO of being the target of espionage. You need to get the facts, if only to cover your own asses. If it turns out the accusations are hogwash, then you have facts of your own that you can release to counter whatever hogwash the government puts out. If it turns out your CEO committed a crime or otherwise did something improper, then you need to dismiss the CEO to prevent your complicity in the crime. If it turns out there holes in your security protocols around top executives, you need to plug those holes.

But until you have the facts, coming from an independent investigation, neither they nor us have any clue what the right response is.

Drones' ability to absolutely dominate the battlefield inside of ~200km is just too powerful. You'll end up with small regional powers that are basically impregnable to invasion, but also can't project power because the range of drones is too short. City-states, basically. And because the defining characteristic of a state is its monopoly on physical force, the structure of the state will adapt to the dominant military technology of the time.

Interest rates are the big wildcard. If this is the start of a significant rising cycle, akin to 2022/2023, then the AI bubble is toast and all these companies are dead. If the Fed pauses in December/January there may be a window of opportunity in early 2027 and we'll see both OpenAI and Anthropic IPO and possibly jump.

Rising interest rates are a triple whammy to AI companies: 1) risk capital always flees first when rates go up, so the available capital dries up 2) they and their suppliers have borrowed significantly to fund datacenter expansion, so rising rates will directly increase their expenses and 3) AI is considered an investment for their customers, and corporate finance always pulls back on more speculative investments when rates go up, and so their customers will likely pull back and directly shrink their revenue.

The big ball of mud structure is often taken to be an antipattern: at least, when I Googled this, Gemini told me it's a "haphazard, tangled anti-pattern" and gave me some advice about how to refactor such a software system into a beautiful diamond. But nearly all software systems that people actually use and maintain are big balls of mud. This is because the big ball of mud tolerates partial failure extremely well. It tolerates changing requirements very well. It tolerates parallel development very well. You can change part of it without throwing away the whole thing.

AI is a beautiful diamond. For the most part, if an AI model malfunctions, you have to blow it away and retrain it. Or I guess you can build layers to fix up the output case-by-case, but then you're really building a big ball of mud around the beautiful diamond, and obscuring it in the process.

That's a little worrisome when it comes to durability. Living, enduring systems usually end up becoming a patchwork of mud. Your ability to do this with LLMs are basically limited to LoRa patches and post-processing steps.

The concern with features like these is that the suggestions are considered to be corporate speech that the company is endorsing, and so it can be held liable for any that break relevant laws. Internet companies are generally considered common carriers when they're just passing around stuff other people write, but when they are generating their own content through machine-learning algorithms they are held to be the actual responsible party.

I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits and criminal prosecution against LLMs so far, though it probably helps that the current U.S. president is a combative asshole that prides himself on how much he can offend every group under the sun.

And there's actually a good chance that PG&E is not being paid: most of the big tech companies have large solar installations covering the parking lot which power all the EV chargers, so they cut PG&E out of it entirely and produce their own power.