they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why effective altruits would join it.

if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future AGI.

they make nothing open source, so I'm not sure why effective altruists would join it.

if they can't predict and contain the consequences of their own actions, how can they predict and contain their so claimed future "AGI".

Is there any reason to assume open source is a prerequisite for effective altruism?

Open source doesn’t necessarily imply good for humanity, for example distributing open source designs for nukes would probably be a net negative.

And even if it did, effective altruists wouldn’t need to prioritize the benefit provided by openness over all other possibilities.

I don't think relying on a proprietary license to make sure enemies can't get AI for nukes is a sane security model. Something else needs to give.

Operator?

Operator in this context refers to someone who successfully runs a business that someone else founded. Often the visionary founder is not good at the nuts and bolts of running and growing a business so they hand off the reins to someone who is. Think Steve Jobs vs Tim Cook.

It doesn’t mean that at all, it’s slang

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=operator

It has a meaning in a business context apart from a slang term

For a decade, "operator" in Silicon Valley as has been used exactly as the commentator above describes it.

Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.

And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.

It seems like underselling the successful part and overselling the part about not being the founder, but I can see it's a slang term. Thanks.

And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.

I learned the business context before the spec ops context and honestly the former makes way more sense to me than the latter.

A business operator is like a machine operator. You're pulling levers on a machine that someone else built while optimizing and tweaking to get the best performance out of that machine as possible.

I was quite wrong about this, but I still don't think it's especially relevant that someone else built it. You would never call Zuckerberg an operator? Or when someone else built it does that not mean that you had no role in building it? That would be the exception, but it would be analogous to owner/operator in general business parlance.

I think now, having tried to fill in my missing knowledge, that it comes from the same root as DevOps, which I erroneously thought was related to SpecOps. DevOps comes from IT Operations which comes from Operations Management, which yes, is like a machine operator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_management

Edit: here's a post with "Founder Operators". Which seems like maybe if you just heard "Operator" you would assume they're not a founder, but also that the term can be applied for those running businesses they founded: https://startupceo.com/2023/01/5-things-successful-founder-o...