Taking a break from work and just going for a walk/bike ride in a forest or visiting some interesting place while traveling and working remotely often gave me really great ideas that helped me to solve problems at hand much faster than sitting in an office, fighting with a problem. Like what would take me a week to solve was often done in a day when changing scenery.
Former colleagues told me about a guy who went fishing on a lake and got an idea how to solve some distributed system problem there, then came back, wrote a system using water level, bubbles and fish names and called it an aquarium or something. It worked well for the next decade.
How is Stability AI going to make money? What they provide is super cool and VCs are into it but at some point they need to start giving them returns. Is the plan to get acquired?
Their business plan is to build custom models for clients/companies who want to own models built on their own data. No comment on the viability of such a business model.
You can buy credits to generate images using DreamStudio. In theory, this seems more convenient than running software locally. But last I checked, their image quality wasn’t all that interesting compared to MidJourney, so I stopped using it.
The Discord-based UI for MidJourney is clunky and unreliable, and waiting for images to generate is annoying. Image quality has improved quite a bit, but it’s no better at following instructions. So it seems like there’s an opening for a competitor, but the competition would need to actually be better.
When even users are recommending a subscription service, that's when you know we have become brainwashed into thinking it's a healthy or required practice.
I think they should first stop treating depression as a single illness. There are likely thousands different reasons for brain to end up with similar symptoms. Many forms of nutritional deficiencies likely turn into something that can be symptomatically classified as depression and sometimes be fully reversible by just restocking that missing nutrient or reducing its intake. Yet we clinically classify such conditions the same as ones caused by some brain injury or mentally horrible experiences that rewire brain circuits in weird ways.
You don't have to. Your foreign workers can be independent consultants receiving money from you, paying their own taxes. You just need their W-8BEN every year.
That still means you negociate and maintain individual contracts with each of them, and have to deal with what happens when conflicts arise (let's say one of them disappears with a client's confidential info in the middle of a critical project. Your only reasonable action is to cut the losses, short of trying to go sue them in Zimbabwe's court)
Or more interestingly, I'd assume an independant consulting contract could be void in many legislations if it happens that their work should be reclassified as employment under some specific rules (e.g. you dictate their working hours etc.)
Basically, is the contract valid under the worker's country laws is a question you won't be able to ignore I guess ?
That makes them compliant with American law. Your company may still not be in compliance with local law (which can differ significantly in the liberal interpretation of what the us thinks a contractor is), and that can cause serious issues.
The employee may find themselves in hot water or facing some serious tax implications, the company may find that they are no longer able to do business there, the executives of the company may find that they have trouble at the border.
Depending on treaties, not having a formal business entity in a country doesn’t make you immune to their laws and taxes (not a lawyer, but it is totally possible to collect foreign debts in the US for example), if you’re publicly traded, breaking foreign laws intentionally is a BAD idea. On top of all that most companies strive to stay on the right side of the law regardless of the ability to get away with it.
Not an exact parallel, but see the saga of the Huawei exec who was arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for a business deal made by a Chinese company with Iran.
Are you probably going to get away with it? Yes, if you aren’t a very big fish. But what if you don’t.
They love having contractors, what they hate is having contractors and the IRS later telling them "no, they are employees, and you owe payroll taxes and penalties for the last 5 years"
It’s actually made substantially worse by the fact that every jurisdiction that you “hire” a remote worker in is another jurisdiction whose laws you have to comply with. An American contractor suing an American company in a Californian court is at least a risk their legal department should know how to manage. An Australian contractor suing an American company in an Australian court, followed up by an Australian labor authority taking action against them for say not paying proper sick leave entitlements, is something they’d be much less equipped to handle. Then just multiply that by the number of jurisdictions they hire these remote workers in, which is information they might not even have.
> An Australian contractor suing an American company in an Australian court, followed up by an Australian labor authority taking action against them for say not paying proper sick leave entitlements
Does "contractor" mean something different to you than it does to everyone else? This would be like me buying an iPhone and then Apple suing me for not paying proper sick leave entitlements.
In many jurisdictions, the US included, whether or not you are a contractor is not up to you and the company you do the work for. E.g. even if both parties think it’s a contracting relationship, the IRS can decide otherwise.
The nature of the relationship, and the work you are doing determines whether your employer is a regular employer and what taxes they have to pay. In Canada, for example, certain taxes (GST) are applied to the contractor relationship based on whether the product the company sells is available within the country, and the distinction between contractor and employee is much less fuzzy than it is in the US (if you have to ask, the person is almost certainly an employee).
It means something different in every location, and I’m just using Australia as a random example. The fact is that channeling your payroll through an offshore company doesn’t allow you to skirt local labor laws. It would be more like you selling me a faulty iPhone, then after realising that my country had consumer protection laws, you were forced to fix it.
The risk of “misclassification” where an independent contractor sues to be classified as an employee, or where some labor or tax authority takes legal action to have a contractor reclassified (with or without the consent of the contractor/employee) exists in basically every jurisdiction. The only thing that changes if you move your contractors overseas is the jurisdiction where that dispute will be heard, because it will happen in the jurisdiction where the contractor/employee is located. Even if you put aside the mischaracterisation risks, each jurisdiction is likely to have different worker safety, entitlements, tax… obligations, even for contractors. If any disputes arise relating to those, they’re also going to be heard in the jurisdiction of the contractor/employee.
I can understand where your misunderstanding comes from, thinking they’re all just businesses providing services to other businesses. But this interpretation is very naive, and the legal reality is massively more complicated than you’re making it sound. Governments really don’t like independent contractors, they’re subject to far more restrictions than ordinary businesses, and companies employing their services are usually exposed to risks that they don’t have when dealing with ordinary businesses.
On an individual basis that makes sense (in particular if you really handle it like a service exchange contract, with little to no management on how the person do their work)
In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly legal on their side, and wasn't covered by the contract as you had your own country's law in mind.
I'm not sure you could push your country's law on them, nor that it would help your situation as your company is still fronting the backlash.
In the grand scheme, having remote workers not handled by a proxy company is also extremely rare.
And even in that setup, we all remember Nike and many other apparel makers stuck with the "child worker in a factory" image basically forever. Or Apple being questionned about FoxConn's working conditions, or the environmental impact.
When it comes to PR, pushing the responsibility to the foreign contractor doesn't looks like a good working strategy IMHO.
Power grab and preservation. This will be quickly approved to preserve existing players and power status quo (lawyers, managers and doctors don't want to be automated away).
If an AI comes along that is able to do their job better than them then they will not have a say in that. No matter how many regulations the government puts up.
Is like trying to regulate cars to save the horse shoe industry.
And if doctors can be automated away so can software developers. I guess in the long term we are all obsolete.
> Is like trying to regulate cars to save the horse shoe industry.
Which was quite common in the early days of automobiles. There also wasn’t quite the massive bureaucratic regulatory system back then.
The big difference is these AI doctors will need to be certified by, wait for it… current doctors. Or, at the very least, the training data (haven’t RTFA so that’s the example being thrown around the comments) will need to be certified.
Judging by how the EU countries deal with labor issues I think there’s little chance robots will replace human doctors for a long, long time.
Frankly, most essays in MBA or almost any social science school can be outsourced to AI with a small context window so teachers need to get more creative; either force people to read more papers (larger context window) or make certain checkpoints throughout the assignment that need to continue context from previous portions in some specific ways.
I have a degree in chemistry, and years later went back to college to do Deaf Studies. I didn't complete that one, though I'd like to go back and try again. So I've seen both STEM and social sciences.
Deaf Studies is a small field. The experts mostly know each other personally. The lecturer cites a study, and then mentions that she was visiting the author last month, and describes chatting with the author's trilingual young child. The lecturer wrote the main textbook you ought to be citing, or perhaps their close friend did. Hallucinating citations would not work. I doubt that Open AI would be in any way helpful.
(Besides, I actively enjoy putting words together, and had a genuine love of the subject.)
I think the art of creating own UIs was lost once Windows started dominating; prior to that every single game or app had to create their own GUI from scratch. It only somewhat survived in gaming.
