It is Yishan Wong, former CEO of reddit!
Oh wow, it is Yishan Wong, former CEO of reddit! I am octal's Twitter friend.
You know me as Ellie Kesselman of Quora, and maybe Second Life too? I heard that breast physics is much improved since my visits to Second Life in 2010. I'm unsure why Facebook Meta seems to support less functionality than Second Life does, now and even in 2005. Everyone in Second Life had legs, for example! Meta is still working on solving that problem. Other than a subset of physical rehabilitation and occupational therapy providers for whom it is a caregiver specialty field, no one wants to see what it's like to be a paraplegic, just for fun.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🎉🥳
Best wishes for a safe and prosperous 2024 to you and your family. I like your LJ avatar. It fits your persona! Are you still in Daly City? I wish I were! Anywhere but home with my mother in Scottsdale, AZ yet again. I'm doing my usual desultory search for financial risk management jobs, preferably at another bank and as a director or above.
This is a remote corner of the interwebz to find y'all. Ryan is looking good! He is slim and smiling with a happy 🦉 owl perched on his head as his profile picture on the twitter. I spend too much time on the former bird app, as EllieAsksWhy. Please stop by and say hi!
Quora is kind of a cesspool. First there was the Quora Question Generator bot. Then Adam d'Angelo went hog wild with his Poe AI to create answers. The combo is like a Quora content bot. So not-fun. Although... by having deep enough pockets, Adam could wait until decent LLMs came along:
Finally, he found a way to monetize Quora!
Well, that's my theory: I think Adam is slurping up 12 years of Quora Q&A content as training data for Poo AI [sic].
In other news, Quora real names policy was tossed to the wayside loooooong ago, so I am now Math Troll 🤭 Charlie Cheever seems to be thriving since 2018, with a new framework or something. Will we ever discover why Charlie departed? It is a mystery of the Sam Altman in-and-out of OpenAI caliber.
Adam d'Angelo is on the board of directors of OpenAI. Wonder what he and Larry Summers think of each other. Larry Summers was appointed as the surprise new chairman of the Board of Directors of OpenAI following the huge drama about the OpenAI BoD no longer being able to trust Sam. The big question remains: Why did the OpenAI BoD decide that Sam Altman (also known as sama on X the application formerly known as Twitter) was lying to them? We still don't know the answer to that.
Last part of this long comment which I doubt you or Ryan will ever see (livejournal is sorta moribund along with the rest of the blogoverse): While vandalizing uhhh editing sama's Wikipedia BLP awhile back, I found and slightly expanded upon a Yishan bread crumb trail. Sam Altman was a reddit CEO too, if only for a few days.
There is a confluence of events that I didn't mention in my comment on octal's post. One of Quora's favorite sons during the early days of the company's existence was Brandan Smietana and his super stealth Silicon Valley start-up, Symbolic Analytics. At first, I did not get along with Brandan and his best friend from the elite east coast prep school and Ivy League university they both attended. As time went by, Brandan and I discovered shared interests, and became Quora then Twitter friends. Brandan has gone silent as since about 2016, other than a cryptocurrency venture which was likely no different than others. It seems to have had the decency not to rip-off too many HODLers, unlike most others.
I digress. Brandan's best friend then was Joe Hewitt. Joe Hewitt posted a lot of content on Quora that belonged on r/thathappened. In 2010, Brandan and Joe were still really good friends, and Joe moved to the Palo Alto area. Joe really needed to find a job. (He wrote a massively upvoted post about how his multi-millionaire father had a sudden reversal of fortune.) Symbolic Analytics couldn't make use of Joe's talents, which were not of the programming sort. The kindly founder of a location-based data service found a position for him. The company was Loopt and the founder was Sam Altman.
Loopt was the start-up that galvanized Sam Altman to drop out of Stanford after only one semester as a computer science major.