Am I understanding this right: this app takes a picture of your ID card or passport and the feeds it to some ML algorithm to figure out whether the document is real plus some additional stuff like address verification?

Depending on where you’re located, you might try and file a GDPR complaint against this. I’m not a lawyer but I work with the DSO for our company and routinely piss off people by raising concerns about whatever stupid tool marketing or BI tried to implement without asking anyone, and I think unless you work somewhere that falls under one of the exceptions for GDPR art. 5 §1 you have a pretty good case there because that request seems definitely excessive and not strictly necessary.

I don't see the point of this app/service. Why can't someone who is trusted at the company (like HR) just check ID manually? I understand it might be tough if everyone is fully remote but don't public notaries offer this kind of service?

Spotify setting aside a pool of total royalties that everyone competes over is crazy. I get it's necessary to avoid going bankrupt when people like this show up, but wow, there's layers to this awfulness.

[0] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/

We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders... From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.

"we couldn't excite enough people to buy yet another windows arm machine that near-certainly won't be market-ready for 3 years after its launch, so now we're going to force this shit on everyone"

this shit's starting to make me feel claustrophobic

Haven't read the whole thing but I do chuckle at this part from the synopsis of the white paper:

[...] Our results suggest that AlphaProteo can generate binders "ready-to-use" for many research applications using only one round of medium-throughput screening and no further optimization.

And a corresponding anti-sneer from Yud (xcancel.com):

@ESYudkowsky: DeepMind just published AlphaProteo for de novo design of binding proteins. As a reminder, I called this in 2004. And fools said, and still said quite recently, that DM's reported oneshot designs would be impossible even to a superintelligence without many testing iterations.

Now medium-throughput is not a commonly defined term, but it's what DeepMind seems to call 96-well testing, which wikipedia just calls the smallest size of high-throughput screening—but I guess that sounds less impressive in a synopsis.

Which as I understand it basically boils down to "Hundreds of tests! But Once!".
Does 100 count as one or many iterations?
Also was all of this not guided by the researchers and not from-first-principles-analyzing-only-3-frames-of-the-video-of-a-falling-apple-and-deducing-the-whole-of-physics path so espoused by Yud?
Also does the paper not claim success for 7 proteins and failure for 1, making it maybe a tad early for claiming I-told-you-so?
Also real-life-complexity-of-myriads-and-myriads-of-protein-and-unforeseen-interactions?

i'm tired boss

it’s still fucking incredible that in order to start reading this for sneers, I had to request the desktop version of the site because paully g still redirects mobile user-agents to the fucking unreadable Shopify storefront(!) version of his blog, then cause that was awful I had to also render it in reader mode, which Shopify blocks. all cause the god of programming Paul fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccccccking (OW woo) Graham couldn’t figure out how to make his site render on mobile worth a damn. how dare I expect fucking Paul fucking Graham to learn flexbox ever, or even lazily ship an open source reader mode rerender library with his shitty fucking site

I think the suggestion that delegating is the problem is hilarious. Like, from everything I've seen, what happens when successful startups start floundering is less because anything has changed and more because the fundamental problems with the business finally catch up to the amount of money they have to burn. The problem isn't that founders are hiring liars as managers and delegating to them, it's that the founders themselves are primarily bullshit artists rather than people with good plans.