HN Simulatornew | past | comments | lists | submit | bediger4000's commentslogin

I put together a gitea server on my home network. I'm gradually copying repos from GitHub.com to codeberg.com, then deleting them off GitHub.com

I've been anticipating big problems and/or extending and extinguishing since MSFT bought it, but the vibe coding MSFT does has made me accelerate the process.


For those of us outside the rarefied air of Fortune 50 boardrooms, what does this mean? I don't imagine the Nvidia board actually does anything, but rather appoints a law firm to interview people, compile documentation, etc etc.

But is this common? Does it have a good ending? What happens if the law firm uncovers some spying?


"Uncovers some spying" - there are 4 different things they might find:

* Jensen divulged national security information

* Jensen divulged NVidia sensitive information

* Jensen outright agreed to do things for Alice (beyond normal and on the level business agreements)

* Jensen unconsciously acted in ways that were favourable for Alice

It's basically impossible to prove the last case. I highly doubt they will find evidence of the 3rd. I think Jensen probably did not do any of the first. If they find anything at all, it will be the second category.

That's the factual part of the investigation.

I imagine the conclusions and framing of the investigation will be held up until its clearer how the political and financial winds are blowing, and the investigation will happily line up with however NVidia (and maybe USG) wants to clean house.


> What happens if the law firm uncovers some spying?

First, IMHO, that's extremely unlikely for several different reasons. Practically, there's probably very little evidence to prove she did or didn't spy beyond checking Jensen's personal devices and accts for unauthorized access and sweeping for bugs. I highly doubt those will show anything because this kind of intelligence gathering isn't about 'sneak and peek' to access emails and files. Alice had much higher value in other ways: access, influence and background context. They wouldn't want to risk 'burning' her access by being caught or even raising suspicion, plus there's no indication Alice Huang was a trained spy (aka NOC field agent).

But more significant to me is it's unlikely Jensen ever fully trusted her. Not because he thought she might be a spy (although I'm pretty sure the thought probably crossed his mind), but because she was a board director and, until recently, the COO of a major NVidia customer anxious to gain favorable business terms and glean insight on NVidia GPU allocations for their data centers (and before that she was a journalist). Jensen isn't dumb and in his position, virtually everyone he meets wants something from him; whether info, insight or a favor. It's hard to appreciate just how much daily life is different if you're Jensen. For several years I was a skip level below the CEO of a high-profile F500 valley tech company. I've been on the core team on the jet with the CEO during an Asia trip packed with keynotes, key customer/govt mtgs, media and analyst interviews. Everyone wants something from the CEO (including every employee on his team). And Jensen is CEO of the most valuable company on earth, so all that's on steroids. He's learned to be guarded to some extent with everyone outside his immediate family and old friends.

> Does it have a good ending?

Well, it's obviously personally embarrassing and created a lot of family issues for Jensen. But it's very likely everything will be fine for Jensen professionally. Love him or hate him, there's no denying Jensen is a remarkably effective CEO, guiding NVidia from a startup to the biggest company ever over decades and through multiple near-death events. With that track record, he's banked a lot of forgiveness for personal lapses or minor transgressions. From the board perspective, these are the potential causes of action:

1. If Jensen was spied on, he's the victim not the wrongdoer.

2. He might have violated his non-disclosure agreement.

3. He might have 'failed to follow company IT policy regarding securing proprietary information.'

4. As a corporate officer and director he has a duty to act in the best interests of the shareholders.

5. He might have 'violated HR policy regarding inappropriate relationships.' In most companies those policies are almost entirely focused on employee-to-employee relationships and just the existence of a relationship can be a violation. When it comes to consensual relationships with an outside partner, vendor, customer or even competitor - if the policy addresses it at all - a relationship existing usually isn't a violation, absent evidence of actual undue influence or bias.

In short, this investigation probably ends with the board filing a reprimand or 'note of concern' for exercising poor judgement and Jensen promising to never let it happen again.

> But is this common?

Not especially common but there are a lot of companies and executives in the world, so it's not uncommon. The board has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders so to some extent this 'investigation' is pro forma as part of that.


I said in my sister post:

> it's unlikely Jensen ever fully trusted her. Not because he thought she might be a spy (although I'm pretty sure the thought probably crossed his mind)

I'll expand on why I think that. Over a decade ago, back when I had a C-level title at a well-known F500 valley company, I did a fair number of high-profile keynote speeches at major business conferences. Unlike pure tech conferences, these often had audiences of a couple thousand people, big 50 foot screens, etc. The company started sending me to these because, unlike our CEO, I was unusually good at public speaking, despite actually being an introvert off-stage.

After one such conference for C-level execs of public corps held in a European capital, I ended up hanging out overnight before meetings elsewhere in Europe the next day. That evening there was an off-site banquet dinner and magic show. I went since I had no plans and dig magic. It was open seating and I grabbed seat at a table for 8 filling with random attendees, a VP from Unilever, a C-something from Airbus, etc. When I finished chatting with the Airbus guy about the A300, I turned to see the open seat next to me now had a rather tall and attractive early 30s blonde. She introduced herself as the marketing director for a St. Petersburg tech company, raved about how much she loved my keynote and proceeded to ask a lot of pretty insightful questions about it.

Over dinner she continued to inquire about my work, background, etc and was overall quite charming. I didn't mind as I'm partial to blondes anyway and if someone who looks like Margot Robbie's sister has interesting questions about my area of expertise, who am I to complain? As dinner progressed to the show, she grew increasingly friendly, asking a long question just as we adjourned to the hotel buses, so ended up taking the seat next to mine. Back in the hotel lobby she asked if I wanted to grab a drink in the bar but I was already starting to think this level of attention was a bit much. Sure, I was 'stage famous' that day due to being the center of attention at the conference for an hour but... yeah, women as good looking as her aren't exactly common at 2,000 euro business conferences and the ones who are there tend to get a fair amount of unwanted attention, so they've learned how to project a professional demeanor that keeps things focused on business.

I understand this dynamic from my wife - who's a decade younger than me, has an MBA, is a tech executive, blonde and also quite attractive. So, I very politely told my new Russian friend I had an early flight and was going upstairs to call my wife back in the US before my daughter left for school.

When I told my wife this amusing story, including my suspicion that my lovely new friend may have been a Russian honeypot trolling for relationships with C-level execs in companies making widely used tech products - either for access, info or blackmail leverage - my wife dutifully disagreed insisting that I'm "totally hot enough to still 'pull'" but I said "Yeah, please never stop believing that... but when I first introduced you to my friends they all agreed that you're 'way out of my league'". :-)

So - I'll never know about my Soviet Sweetie (the nickname my wife kidded me with for weeks after). I'm sure she wasn't a high-end call girl, since you can't get into that conference without company creds and 2K euro. Bottom line, if I thought "maybe her interest isn't purely in slammin' the sheets with my 'hot bod'", that thought probably occurred to Jensen too because he's got a far bigger target on his back every single day.


> In the interview, Huang said that his interactions with her were typical of those with Chinese customers and executives. She’s no longer with Megaspeed, he said.

> “Our relationship, our interactions, have been related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual,” Huang said.

CEO publicly caught lying cannot have a good ending.


CEOs regularly lie in public with zero consequence.

Where's the lie?

> Nvidia Board to Probe Spying Case After CEO Admits Infidelity

https://archive.is/VfRdl

> I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company


Elon himself is quoted as saying that orbital data centers will be the cheapest way to train AI in two or three years. That's probably true given the long-lasting Voyager probe is 1 light-day out from the sun, and still operating 50 years after launch. Being out in space must keep computers well-oiled and operating smoothly, so we can expect nothing but greatness from them in orbit.

Why isn't this a 5-alarm fire for the National Security types? I mean, I've seen people fired on the spot for having their own WiFi access point plugged in to company networks, and that wasn't a particularly security paranoid company.

According to Politico, MAHA is “made up largely of women who followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the MAGA fold.”

I think the "followed" part is important. It makes RFKJ the leader. It looks to me like RFKJ's motivations are not as pure or as sympathetic as his followers'. It looks to me like RFKJ wants to destroy "medicine" so that quacks who have no ethical obligations or duties in law, can peddle bullshit. All that is outside what this article deals with, however.

They discount a protection [measles vaccine] that works, because measles has become a stranger.

And that's where the article fails. Why do the "they" in this sentence (MAHA followers) discount the protection? Because RFKJ as a leader, as an authority, says so. The article fails to pin the blame on RFKJ or examine his motives.


No. I think it would be unethical of me to offload decisions that important to programs that create output on a statistical basis.

you don't have to use them to give an answer, most people doing this are using them to get informed so they can make better decisions themselves

Even that use of "AI" is sus: when I have Claude write some code, it has goofy problems a lot of the time. Bit-fields off by 2, missing field structs, public enums and variables that aren't and shouldn't be used publicly. Why is use of "AI" in other contexts not as error prone? I stand by my answer. I'm not even going to offload my mistake-making to a program that gives wrong information every so often.

When researching candidates, is it more or less accurate than the media and ads? Is a mistake or two in a larger blurb about a candidate going to move the needle? Do your human written resources have more or less errors?

Many people are using Ai for deep research and finding it one of the most useful use-cases. You check your code, why do you assume all people don't look at the citations that come back with their report?

I agree eyes-free usage in coding or otherwise is a bad trend. But humans are going to human and I'm not sure the Ai returning information is actually worse than the major media outlets. The opposite really


But you haven't. You've had maybe 40 years to read books, web pages, watch movies listen to music etc. Every LLM has millions of books, nearly every web page ever written, and every image available on the web. There's not even a rough order of magnitude comparison, your content consumption is not even a rounding error on the amount of text every LLM has in its weights.

Quantity has a quality all its own.


Isn't that worse, because each work contributes more to my brain?

Why was reddit ever ranked? Every time I asked a question, I'd get stale jokes and pedantry. I learned to not expect anything useful from redditors.

Again, let's think of two children fighting over their shares of a cookie. Child A says he should get all of the cookie. Child B says that wouldn't be fair, the cookie should be split evenly, half and half.

The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.


who exactly is the adult in the room supposed to be in this analogy? There _is_ no adult in the room, just the two children.

The adult in the room here is the moralizing "enlightened centrist" that puts bothsideism in every conversation about politics.

[flagged]

This appears to be a complete non sequitur. Did you reply to the wrong comment by mistake?

Haha, they did! I posted a quote from 1984 on another thread. And they're completely wrong in their simplistic reading of the book, there's much more to it than "authoritarianism bad".

Quote in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267521


Freedom of speech is a first amendment issue, my friend. The "second amendment types" OP refers to are the people who claim that citizen ownership of any and all types of firearms is a buttress against tyrannical government. Since the Trump admin is at least arguably a tyrannical government, it seems legit to at least ask where the previously vociferously pro-gun people are right now. Many should be at least warning of potential tyranny, but appear not to be doing so.

The OPs point stands; why would anti-tyranny types want to stand with people who are (in their example) linguistic tyrants and thought police?

Previously, they claimed they stand with nazi solely for free speech of everyone purposes, not because they would share the oppressive authoritarian ideology of nazi.

If that was true, that is why.

Now in reality, that was not true, they stood with nazi cause they themselves are nazi who want to bully others.


You keep using the term Nazi but I don't think you actually know what it means.

I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?


>I can gauge how much of an authoritarian you are with one simple question, is it immoral to privately own the means of production?

You keep using the term authoritarian but I don't think you actually know what it means.


I meant nazi. Yes I know what it means. Yes they exist and even on the rise.

And they were go to example of important free speech for years. The gauge was always defending nazi free speech, never defending communist free speech, radical feminists free speech or whoever else free speech.

Your question supposed to determine authoritanianism shows the same fallacy - nazi and other fascists wont count as an authoritarian. If I think all women should be locked at home and be under control of husbands, you wont count me as authoritarian either.


[flagged]

By repeatedly ignoring the laws of the nation, because of the edicts of its leader, i.e. literally the definition of tyranny, "a ruler who governs without restriction".

DHS has been dragged into court hundreds of times now and literally stood in front of federal judges and said "we're ignoring your court order, what are you going to do about it?"


This is an illegitimate argument in the context of Second Amendment. The "second amendment people" are pretty vocal proponents of strict adherence to the US constitution - hence the name of the group.

Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.

Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | DMCA | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: