@howellsacto@questionableway It wasn't a technicality. The evidence was totally equivocal on whether or not he was going the speed necessary to be guilty!
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
@leiftree@daviss It’s a fake nonprofit that the mayor used to funnel hundreds of thousands of tax $ to a violent street gang so that they would surreptitiously clear protestors from GFS.
This would, of course, be a totally outlandish accusation if it wasn’t 100% true and done out in the open.
Without a doubt, our best trail camera capture yet: the first documented observation of a cougar with kittens in Minnesota in modern history. Turn up the volume to hear all the vocalizations.
The footage, which was captured on March 25, shows a cougar with 3 large kittens while they feed on a deer they killed just south of Voyageurs National Park.
We captured this surreal footage because we started a study to understand the survival and mortality patterns of deer in our area this winter. As part of that work, we GPS-collared several deer in the area in January.
In late March, we received a mortality signal from a GPS-collared deer and found the carcass buried under a pile of leaves on a hillside—a tell tale sign of feline predation.
We suspected it was likely a bobcat but thought, just possibly, it could be a cougar. So we put up two trail cameras on the cached deer carcass and 4 hours later, two cougar kittens returned to the kill.
The entire family showed up that evening and spent hours in front of our cameras. In total, we captured 7.3 hr (435 minutes) of video footage of these animals. We will share more footage soon!
Huge thanks to the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund for supporting the Voyageurs Wolf Project and the recent effort to understand deer survival in the area. Their support was critical to this observation—without it, we would never have captured this footage.
And huge thanks to the >10,600 donors who have supported our project and enabled us to purchase trail cameras supplies. The cameras (and batteries, SD cards, mounts) we set at this kill were purchased with funds from donations.
@rieszspieces It would be an across-the-board ‘no’ which demonstrates that a lot of the whining about training costs is cynical. We could throw in socializing med school tuition and I suspect a vast majority would still prefer the status quo.