Brother DCP-L2550DW here. One of the cheapest b/w multifunction devices with automatic document feeder and reasonable print and scan performance. Works like a charm on Linux, Windows, Android, and IOS.
I am using it with [NAPS2](https://www.naps2.com/), which is brilliantly simple, multi-platform, free, and open-source.
Starbucks gets prepayments for goods and services and just has a neat bit of accounting and marketing gimmick around it. Besides being a sensationalist take, it's also misunderstanding what makes a company into a "bank".
You can't withdraw your balance in cash, as you can with a bank account. You can't transfer your balance to someone else like you can with a bank account. And, unlike a bank, your Starbucks gift card balance expires after some period of time. Can you imagine your bank telling you that all the money in your account is theirs because you haven't used the account in a few months?
Actually true in a technical sense. At least for Starbucks, their gift cards don't expire anywhere globally. In accounting terms though, the company still reduces the value of its gift card liability every year by about 10-15% [1], and claims that this is based on historical data.
Now clearly, there are circumstances in which banks do something similar and close accounts of account holders that are unknown. However, if that occurred at even one hundredth of the Starbucks breakage rate, all regulatory hell would break loose on the bank.
[1] Starbucks reports breakage of around $212.7m in FY22 ($181.1m in FY21). Their liabilities to Stored Value Cards are $1,641m and $1,596m respectively, coming out to a breakage ratio of 13.0% and 11.4% respectively.
Anything from fool.com is as bad as forbes.com these day -- in my eyes. They pump out so much sensationalist garbage that masquerades as good investment advice. Fifteen years ago, they were really impressive -- the original authors.
Does anyone know if Azure's OpenAI Studio is down as well? For everyone using ChatGPT APIs in production, this needs to be the most straightforward failover mechanism.
Using this to plug our open-source tool https://github.com/Marvin-Labs/lbgpt which allows ChatGPT consumers to quickly load balance and failover between OpenAi and Azure models.
I feel people tend to forget that MSFT owns only 49% of OpenAI. There are people owning the rest, and they presumably have some interest in protecting their share of the company from MSFT's aggressive grab. Even if all new development goes to hell, GPT-4 and co are still worth something.
Maybe MSFT really got the deal of a lifetime where they (a) tricked the FTC to not consider anything they are doing to touch antitrust laws due to "only buying 49% of the business" and (b) have a way to "extract" the core assets of OpenAI to the detriment of the remaining shareholders. That's not impossible given the quaint structure OpenAI has and the unusual structuring of the deal with MSFT, but would be quite surprising.
They don't have to be board members to fight. The 51% shareholders are clearly wronged here in my view if MSFT just hires all of OpenAI staff AND takes the existing models and trade secrets.
Again, you should check who those 51% are. If you don't know who they are and what their relationship with Microsoft and the various board members is then you probably won't understand why your comments on this subject don't track.
Hint: the 51% are more likely to go after the board than that they are going to go after Microsoft because the board action is what precipitated this whole mess.
Microsoft is just - conveniently - picking up the pieces and periodically drops hints about what they'll do if anybody gets in their way of doing that.
Presumably, this violates MSFT's investment agreement with OpenAI. Any reasonably competent counsel would add "no-poach" protection for a strategic investor investing in a startup, and this is as clear a case of poaching as there is.
Negotiation is always a two way street. I’m a startup founder. Your investors, when they invest, will send you some documents on key provisions (e.g. pro rata rights) and you and they will go back and forth on what is acceptable. You, as a founder, will not have the ability to unilaterally turn down all requests. Especially in early funding rounds.
Not this sort, as far as I'm aware. The variety where you collude with competitors can be under some legal systems.
The point is to discourage market distortion. Some jurisdictions also make employee contract conditions of a similar nature illegal too, as they interfere with personal freedoms.
A lot of business deals though specifically include clauses to prevent one partner from poaching the other's staff, as otherwise one side could do what appears to be happening here: Unilaterally taking over the entire business.
The current situation probably falls under Force Majeure, though. If most of these people go to Google or Amazon, Microsoft may not be able to deliver the products they depend(ed) on OpenAI for.
Also, in most jurisdictions, no poaching agreements are unenforcable if the employees themselves initiate the transfer. Signing that letter about leaving if Sam is not coming back probably qualifies as a resignation notice.
On top of this, most other AI leaders have already stated that they want OpenAI employees to come to them.
This is quite literally the CTO of Microsoft saying: "Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation and advances our collective mission." I don't think there is a reasonable argument where this is not poaching.
I have all the sympathy with OpenAI employees signing the letter and looking for new jobs.
However, MSFT is basically doing a cheap de-facto acquisition of OpenAI, a company they have invested in. This sets a terrible precedent for companies taking investment from strategic investors where they may stage an opportunistic de-facto acquisition at the sign of any trouble.
Employees are jumping ship. If not Microsoft, they'll go somewhere else. In a normal situation, if Microsoft said they would match the previous employer's compensation, they wouldn't have gotten many takers.
Federally, there is precedent that collaborative projects can be an exception to the general federal prohibition of no poach agreements. Whether that would work on California law (IIRC, the federal prohibition is an application of antitrust law, the California one is a labor protection), and whether the other aspects of the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement would fit in the exception, I don't know.
Yeah, and the California code applies to employees in California, which at least most OAI employees are, so it should be irrelevant that MSFT is in Washington.
Given the relationship between the two, and the context of the matter, I don't expect no-poach agreements to hold much weight here.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, maybe because they aren't illegal in California, but in California, afaict, according to California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, the same code that prevents non-competes, such contracts would be considered void.
Most contracts also have a clause that a breach of one part does not invalidate the remainder. There are elements that typically out live the end of a contract as well, often the poaching and non-compete clause
One could argue that firing the Loopt founder guy who was an at-will employee isn't a material event invalidating a contract unless the contract specifies exactly that.
Really? I'm a lawyer, and I can't even see an argument of how firing a CEO would affect investment agreements at all unless Microsoft specifically conditioned their investment on Altman remaining CEO forever.
The fact that truck drivers do more than just drive isn't a necessity though. There is no reason why truck drivers also needs to be an unpaid loaders/unloaders and any other roles currently taking on by them. It's just a matter of "we've always done it like that". Businesses will reorganize themselves if it means a substantial reduction in transport costs.
The $65k (plus/minus bits and pieces) is then consequently also the cap on the additional costs of the self-driving tech and operations per truck. It's not necessarily obvious to me that we'll be there in the next few years.
Also, some of the easy use cases for potential self-driving tech have - at least in the US - already been put on rail which is in a sense almost a self-driving truck. In my view one of the major opportunities missing for making trucking more cost competitive and reducing the societal impact of trucking (emissions, road wear, less than desirable work conditions for truck drivers) is to move more and more freight onto rail. The US is quite good at it actually, but in particular Europe needs to get their act together on it.
This is just great press hacking by the company, jumping on the coverage ChatGPT has recently received. In essence, the company is just offering a checklist of reasons why the ticket was given by mistake but making it sound advanced and technologically impressive to a wide audience. Which seems like a perfectly fine societal use to me.
I am using it with [NAPS2](https://www.naps2.com/), which is brilliantly simple, multi-platform, free, and open-source.