I doubt the events at the retreat were the only cause for his firing. Creative folks are usually given much wider leeway compared to the bean counters.
It feels like somebody in senior management had it in for Baillie. And the ketamine story provided a sufficient cause.
He has been set free, but his entire life has been destroyed by this "subtle" mistake. Once you have spent time, no employer will touch you with a barge pole. (innocence not withstanding)
The justice system has rules for compensation when they make mistakes. They differ across countries, but one thing is for sure:
You, as a private citizen and thus a target/victim of this, are not going to like them at all. It's something like 20$ per full day locked up in middle America, and 0 for any pretrial detention. Ie. after 2 months your wage and/or unemployment benefits go to zero and if you're innocent you get what is effectively a replacement "wage" of 7300$ per year with deductions. Your rent, of course, does not go to zero. Nor does any other obligation, from Netflix to child support payments.
The main deduction from that 7300$ is whether or not the judge later declared pretrial detention the actual sentence, which they very often do, as especially in the last decade pretrial detention can exceed the punishment for the crime. This means everything goes to zero for pretrial detention. There is no limit to the duration of pretrial detention.
Oh and the justice system for adults actually does have some form of compensation, as in there is something.
If you're a minor, youth services, famous for studies pointing out every decision they make is based on incorrect information (ie. everybody lies to youth services, kids, parents, schools, sports clubs, and of course youth services itself, the justice system and institutions, aside from the massive difference in perspective, all parties are extremely incentivized to lie in essentially all situations, and that is perfectly legal), there is not any form of compensation. There are minors locked up in America with the reasoning akin to "We're 100% sure you did NOT do the crime you're accused of but we still think you need to be protected". Yes, protected, that's why there's no compensation. The prison camp with barbed wire (which you can see on Netflix "Girls Incarcerated", for example) is only for protection.
And you know what the really bad part is. In the barbed wire prison camp, you have the RIGHT to study, as a "protected" (ie. incarcerated) kid. In open institutions, you do NOT have the right to study. There is a particularly bad example of a kid that claims to have put a knife in the throat of a social worker to be allowed to study, and yes, he finished high school (at home, by the way, the prison camp didn't keep him there for more than 2 weeks after the "incident" and yes, they have the right to make that decision)
The appeal has been completed and he's been acquitted. Note the past tense in how the CBC wrote this part:
"The Wisconsin police identified Mr. Klayme as the offender using the incorrect username. His conviction rested on the internet username being attributed to him,” the appeal panel wrote.
The Appeal Court decision said no evidence was found linking Klayme to the girl, the Kik conversations, or the intimate images.
In addition to an acquittal entered on the charges, the sentence and ancillary orders against Klayme were vacated.
> "This is not a situation where an acquittal is entered because the Crown has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the essential elements of an offence or an error during the trial made the verdict unsafe," the appeal panel wrote.
That confused me – but I see now it's supposed to connect to the next paragraph (?!) – "it's not that there was procedural error, it's that he was completely innocent all along". (I do think it's written poorly, but I also haven't had a coffee yet..)
I kinda felt it was satire, but then the below quote threw me off:
> one vendor’s marketing team, cc’d on the cost anomaly alert, issues a press release citing “a 430% YoY increase in adversarial multi-agent security reasoning.” The stock opens up 6%.
That happens! That is not satire.
So i had to visit the comments here to be sure :)
Unfortunately all govt. bodies have been tampering with the economic indicators due to political pressure.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
>I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle
This surprised me too. I'd accepted that price hikes were coming for the new range...that's expected. But hiking prices on the existing range felt like a step too far!
Might have been a marketing stunt to nudge people into upgrading.
Well, if that was the plan, it worked. I just caved and bought an M5 to replace my older one. Boo.
Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now. Similar for other consoles. It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
> Why is that a step too far? e.g. the PS5 price has increased like 25% and it's a 6 year old product now
Precisely because it's a 6 year old product. The $499 the PS5 cost at launch in 2020 is equivalent to ~$650 in 2026 according to the inflation calculator [1]. Within a year it's harder to justify that. Nobody believes Apple is paying the price of the day for components instead of having them negotiated at least for the whole run of a model.
> It feels much more acceptable to me on something like a Mac that's less than a year old (and going to last a long time + have good resale value).
That sounds like it should be exactly the other way around? A PS5 from 2020 is substantially identical with a PS5 from 2026 except maybe for some minor HW optimizations. They are completely fungible. A Mac from this year will compete with a faster model next year, and another even faster model the year after that.
PS5's increased to compensative for the many Sony gaming flops, like the $100m Concord (closed down within a couple of weeks) and the $200m Marathon (still on life support but they had to cancel the much more popular Destiny 2 to prioritise it).
Macs have much shorter lifecycles than consoles, and Apple doesn’t have a history of reducing prices over that lifecycle. Consoles have much longer lifecycles and typically drop in price over time (as components get cheaper).
It seems fair to expect that behaviour to work in both directions.
Yes, exactly. Price hikes mid-cycle is not something I have seen Apple do historically.
If true, one reason could be that: Cook is retiring, while Ternus is on his way in. Ternus wouldn't wanna start off with his first announcement being a ginormous price hike. Makes him look bad.
So Cook becomes the fall guy. i.e., he increases the price by 15% in the existing M5 range.
When Ternus comes in, he keeps prices stable on the M6 range.
Makes Ternus look like an awesome guy...and gets him off on a flying start in his CEO tenure.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that I'm ok with them doing that. It's a matter of consistency.
The PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One all followed the pattern of dropping in price over the course of their lifetimes, because components got cheaper over time. The fact that the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S have gone up in price is consistent with the general price elasticity.
I'm also OK with Apple having a rigid pricing structure and never really doing any sales or discounts, but then I expect them to not raise prices on the current M5 hardware, and leave those price hikes for the M6 generation that I assume is just around the corner.
I haven't seen other people call it but I think the ultimate force behind Moore's law is not transistors getting smaller but transistors getting cheaper. Like you can make them smaller all you want but if you can't make them cheaper you can't afford them.
In the 2020s we've blamed extrinsic causes such as the pandemic and the AI bubble but I am suspecting the intrinsic cause that new processes are more expensive to develop and more expensive to operate.
The tragedy of the PS5 is that even though it has sold a lot of units it doesn't represent the kind of generational change like the PS3 was. There are roughly 15 exclusive games and closest I come to one that I want is a remake of one of my favorite games from almost 20 years ago.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm talking about the product lifecycle, not the device lifecycle.
The M1 Mac mini, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X|S were all released on November 2020.
Since then, Apple has released the M2 mini (Jan 2023) and the M4 mini (Nov 2024), and I'd be willing to bet we'll see an M6 mini later this year. The PS5 has had the habitual mid-generation "Slim" refresh and the Pro (a smallish specs bump), and Xbox Series X|S has seen barely any changes.
My M1 Max MBP is still a beast of a laptop, but it hasn't been the current model in aeons. My Xbox Series X is still current.
This is exactly what I find frustrating. I get comfortable with the latest model X. Then a new sparkly model Y launches.
I am like, I don't need your new fangled Y, that consumes more tokens. My needs are small and i am happy with the older X.
But then X starts to degrade. At first subtly, and then drastically. So then I am forced to upgrade to Y.
What I do not understand is:
> is this a sneaky way for companies to push users up the chain?
> Or is this a genuine fault in model design/resource allocation?
I suppose it is both.
Basically all frontier models are inference-time compute bound thanks to reasoning. And actual reasoning traces are locked behind closed doors at all American labs. So whenever they want to push a new model and need to give it hardware, it would make sense to cut into the reasoning budgets of older models. Users will not be able to see that directly, it will only become apparent on high-end, difficult tasks - exactly the kind of tasks where the provider wants you to use the new model anyway, so they can further improve it.
Can you think of many examples of a SaaS provider who regularly keeps old versions of a product around for customers to use?
A far more common scenario is that new versions are rolled out to everyone, without offering a choice, as soon as they're considered stable.
Older versions consume resources and require staff to spend time on operating and supporting them. Those resources could be used to run a newer version.
The tl;dr is the simple economics of any SaaS product.
If you want to be able to run old versions indefinitely and control the resources assigned to it, you need to self-host (an open model).
I blanket consider any post by these "influencers" as paid for.
But my biggest fear is for my kids. I'm doing my best to teach them about the duplicity that exists in this world, and that's precisely why I'm against blanket social media bans for under-16s.
By the time kids turn 17, they've hit the rebel stage. And that's exactly when the freedom to access social media arrives. At that point, they won't listen to parents. They are going to get soo badly burnt.
This is why I advocate for controlled, early access to social media for children. As a parent, I can monitor what they follow and teach them to distinguish right from wrong.
But with these blanket bans, that's taken out of my hands entirely. They grow up sheltered in a picture-perfect world...and then, boom.
I would consider your two statements as distinct and separate:
> "in a business that is clearly managed by too ambitious people and will never succeed"
> "given that you are legally not a part of the potential fraud ring that you can't prove"
Consider:
1/ If it's a biz that's purposely mucking about without success...or a loss making entity for tax breaks:
I have no problem in working here (Consider that I am in my 40s, used/abused in various "start-ups" and burnt-out. I need the money, and I'll take it.)
2/ If it's a company involved in criminal fraud:
I'd run away as fast as my feet could take me. The problem with fraud is that eventually the authorities will catch up. If the owner is a criminal, he'll do anything to save his backside...even throwing innocent employees under the bus.
You might be exonerated eventually. But that eventually might take years...decades.
Yeah, if you know the business is a fraud, it doesn't matter that your work isn't fraudulent in and of itself. It's like being hired by bank robbers to be their chauffeur. There's nothing illegal about driving, but if you know they're using you to get away from a crime... you're a getaway driver.
I love Belkin products, but it's perverse that external devices require additional software/apps just to be able to use it.