istewart
Altman is certainly aware of what it takes to be a Jobs-like marketing personality (and probably holds Hubbard-like totalism as a not-so-secret ambition), he’s just not, uh, very good at it. He’s put the most effort into the strictly lower-case, faux-casual persona on Twitter to seem “approachable” in a social media context, and that doesn’t help him at all when trying to actually appear serious.
I also don’t doubt that he’s beginning to succumb to the yes-man filter bubble that traps so many public personalities. That’s surely made worse by the likelihood that any underlings he might have reviewing this crap are drinking the AI koolaid and “punching everything up!” with a few rounds of ChatGPT.
A) Putting on my conspiracy theory hat… OpenAI has been bleeding for most of a year now, with execs hitting the door running and taking staff with them. It’s not at all implausible that somebody lower on the totem pole could have been convinced to leak some reinforcement training weights to help Deepseek along.
B) Putting on my best LessWronger hat (random brown stains, full of holes)… I estimate no less than a 25% chance that by the end of this week, Sammy-boy will be demanding an Oval Office meeting, banging the table and screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”
please be gentle with my child, they will soon have a presence on the discount paperback rack at the local grocery store
Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall
Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).